Going Back to My Roots

With finishing up Tales, and sort of starting Deadpool, but really not paying too much attention to it, I find myself heading back to an old, abusive friend - Ragnarok Online.

I logged on a while ago, bored, and ready to spend some money, so I blew over 40 mil zenny (a decent amount of money) on nothing but Bloody Branches. I didn't have any goals, I knew that I was just wasting time and wanted something interesting to do besides grinding, but that one 140 branch breaking streak got me hooked into the game again (at least for now).

A few people started to get back in touch with me, I started to remember my builds and skills, and now I find myself grinding for drops that only drop at 0.6% of the time, wanting to get at least 10 of them so I can try to make one overupgraded to +8. Not for any good purpose, only just because I was bored at work and at home, and didn't want to type, didn't want to do another This American Life entry, didn't want to sleep, and didn't want to play the game that I had in the PS3. It was litterally the worst option that I had on my board, I knew that there were better things that I could, and should, be doing but by the end of the day, I was back on, running around grinding my heart out.

Now, the funny part about Ragnarok Online is that you can leave it for quite some time, and come back and only be slightly behind the curve of where you were when you last left. I haven't actively played that game, easily since before Addie was born. She's almost two years old. But I can go in and stomp some heads in because what I had was good years ago, but because there has been almost no change, it's still really powerful.

The worst part about that game is that grinding leads to grinding which leads to grinding. For example, I wanted to get max job on my High Wizard, for no other purpose than if I snapped a BB that was ghost element that I'd have something to kill it with that I wouldn't be afraid to die on. (Every time you die you loose 1% of your exp, down to the most recent level you're at, if you're at max level, you have nothing to loose). That meant before I did the branches I had to grind my HW. After doing that, I broke the branches, had fun, but then remembered that I wanted a white smith so that I could over upgrade items without having to find other people. That meant grinding my third character ever made, but that started a problem because I needed things from other classes, so that meant I had to jump onto my professor to farm certain things, but to do that I needed my stalker leveled up a bit and him to farm things, and then the cycle just kept going.

Grinding leading to more grinding, which leads to more grinding.

Now, with that said, the good news/bad news of the entire thing goes like this - I gave myself until school starts to go bonkers on the game. Do whatever I want, waste time on it as much as I want, and to be stupid. As soon as school starts, the game goes back to sitting on my computer doing nothing, and I move back into my normal schedule of trying to figure out what in the world I'm doing as a teacher at a university when I have had little to no training in actually being the teacher of a classroom. But hey, at least I've been a professor on RO for a few years so that has to count for something. . . right?