Remembering My First: 200 Days

This is a little different of a post for my "firsts" section which usually pertains to a first time doing something.  My first companion pet, my first dungeon, what have you.  But it still, I believe, fits the category.

The grumpy elf has hit 200 days played.  That is a hell of a lot of time spent on the game.  Way more than I would like to admit looking back at it.  But what is more telling than my 200 days played as my main hunter is the fact that even with my countless alts, and many max level characters over the years, all of them combined do not even come close to touching that 200 days.

It goes to show you that the vast majority of my time spent playing the game has been on my hunter.  Makes sense because it is the character I enjoy playing the most.

Looking back at my 200 days on that character I can't help but wonder what did I spend the most time doing for those 200 days.  Could it be soloing?  Could it be raiding?  Could it be dungeons?  Could it be questing?  Could it be PvP?  Could it be fishing?  No seriously, could it be?

In over 200 days played my hunter has caught over 25,000 fish.  That has to amount to a fair amount of time.  It is not like the fish just come jumping up out of the water at me.  I needed to spend the time catching them.

I think someone once figured out that the average time to catch a fish is 12 seconds, not sure how accurate that is, but using that number it would mean I spent at least 3 and a half days catching fish, I think.  I would guess it is closer to 4 days, for arguments sake.  Have you ever missed a fish because if you have then you will understand why I think it might be closer to 4 days.

4 days played of just catching fish.  That could quite possibly be up there on the activities I have spent the most time on.  If they ever added an achievement for catching 25,000 fish I would be willing to guess I would be one of a very few that would have it.  That is a lot of wasted time, as some would say.

I am sure I spent more time in dungeons however.   Whether it be soloing or with groups or with the dungeon finder I would have to guess I have done at least 1000 dungeons on this one character over the course of the years.  Knowing I spent a lot doing mount runs for the various dungeon ones that 1000 number would be quite generous.  Even if the average run took only 15 minutes that would mean over 10 days played in dungeons.

I can't tell how much of that would be solo stuff or how much of it would be group stuff.  But I do recall some groups while leveling, like mara groups, that would last for what seemed like hours.  Or the dungeons the first weeks of cataclysm where it was not unheard of to get into a 2 hour deadmines run.  Or even a 6 hour one as one guild mate had that first week.  I am sure I have spent nearly as much time in groups as I have solo in dungeons but even separated into two things they would both have to be up there on the list of things I have spent time on in the past 200 days played.

I have not spent much time doing player vs player content, as my complete lack of achievement in that area show me, but I did spend a fair deal doing world PvP.  Yes, even in this dead time where world PvP is nowhere to be found, I always seemed to find some.  I would get some guild mates and we could spend hours going back and forth in the tram.  It was fun and even as a person that is not really into the player vs player aspect of the game I am sure that added up.  Maybe even enough to make it into the top 10 activities over the first 200 days of my game playing life.

Raiding would be like dungeons.  Some solo and the rest as a group.  Even before the days of the LFR I spent a fair deal of time in raids.  With my guild and alone I would spend time there every week.  I don't think a week has went by in the last few years where I did not spend at least 2 hours of my week in a raid, most likely 4.  With the addition of the LFR and some 4 hour adventures alone to finish one of them in this new raid or die expansion I have spent upwards of 10 hours or more a week raiding just in the LFR at some level or another, but not all on this character of course.  But at least half of that has to be attributed to my main, at least I would think.  So if I had to guess I would say my time spent in raids on this character would be roughly the same as that spent in dungeons.  Enough to rank high on my activity list, but not quite enough to make it to the number one spot on it.

So what could be the activity I spent the number one amount of time doing in the first 200 days?  My guess would be traveling.  By traveling I don't mean going from quest objective to quest objective.  I mean time spent running from one place to another, just to get there.  Time spent on a boat.  Time spent on a flight path.  Basically, any time spent getting from point A to point B.  Even if the end result was I was going there to quest, it is the time spent traveling to a zone or area using some sort of transportation method.  That is what I mean by travel time and that is what I believe to be the activity I have spent the most time doing.  Traveling.

It would be nice to think that traveling would not have taken the biggest chunk out of my activities done but thinking back it seems almost impossible that any other activity could even come close..

I remember flying from darnassus to tanaris every day when I first got home from work and knew I was going to play that night.  I learned after my first fight there that it takes roughly three billion years, give or take, to get from darnassus to tanaris so I would come home, log in, get on the flight path and then go about my business at home.  I would usually come back to being logged out from inactivity of course, but at least I did not have to wait while I was in flight.

I spent a lot of time in tanaris because I really liked the zone and then I spent even more time in silithus after that.  I actually went there every single day I played to grind encrypted twilight texts because for some odd reason I enjoyed doing that and I did get a fair deal of experience from it.  If I remember correctly, which I could be wrong, I think I leveled from 58 to 60 just doing that and that alone, a little bit each day.

Not sure what hooked me on it but I was dead set on not stopping until I hit exalted with the Cenarion Circle.  Not like I even knew who they were or what reason I would want to be exalted with them as I had no factions ever at exalted.  I just liked doing it and liked getting that rep.  Please do not ask me to explain it because I can't.  I can, and will some day most likely, go into my first grind and my first exalted reputation and this would be it, for both.

I would say I spent a month or more there alone.  I did not spend as much time playing back then but I did do this a few days a week and it was the only time I played.  I would spend however long it took to fly there, while I was actually AFK doing things much more exciting than staring at the screen while it found the absolute longest path it could ever find to get me to my destination and then I would play for about and hour or an hour and a half before hearthing back for the day.

Yes, I know, I could have just stayed there.  Excuse me for wanting to "go home" at the end of my hard days work of collecting twilight texts.  But the next day it would all begin again.

I think I timed it one day and it took something like 24 minutes to make that flight.  Like I said, I quested a lot in the lower zones of kalimdor, for months most likely, so I am sure that those 24 minute flights added up.  Just like all those other flights added up.

Flying to get around was a huge thing.  I would take flight paths everywhere.  Anything to cut down on the amount of time I needed to run.  Lets face it, running was probably the single most annoying way to travel in the game and quite honestly I am surprised that they have not allowed mounts lower yet.  But at first, you ran and ran and ran so much that I am surprised your character did not turn to the screen and look at you and say, "really, you want me to run back where I just came from after it took me 8 minutes to run here".

Then there was BC, I don't recall ever flying there like we do now, at least not while leveling.  I am also pretty darn sure I did not get flying in northrend until I was like 77 or 78.  So I spent a lot of time hoofing it, mounted on my tiger, or taking a flight path.

I've always been a supporter of lowering the levels for mounted travel.  If they put up a poll asking if we think you should get mounts at level 1 I would say yes.  At least the slow speed land mounts at level 1.  No reason people should have to run until 40, or 30, or now 20.

Do you remember those old world quests that sent you all over the world.  I really loved them, but there was a lot of travel time spent.  From eastern kingdom to kalimdor to eastern kingdom to kalimdor with boats, trams, flight paths, running, all between each move.  I would guess it could be something along the lines of hours of traveling to get each quest line done.  Each of many like it.  Yes, it felt epic, yes I would love to see more like it back in the game, but there was a lot of travel involved, and when thinking about what I spent the most time doing in my first 200 days, that is something to think about.

All this travel, all this time spent, if I had to guess, of the 200 days played that my character has, most of it was spent on the super simple, you don't even notice you are doing it, travel time spent.  A little time here and a little time there, but it all adds up.  It adds up so much so that if someone were to tell me I spent 50 or even 75 of those 200 days traveling from one place to another I would be perfectly capable of believing that.

Thinking back on the first 200 days of playing if I were forced to guess what I spent the most time doing it would be traveling.

I wonder if the newer generation of player, the one that can sit in SW or Org and level through the dungeon system and basically do the vast majority of their game play without traveling would come to the same conclusion I have, that traveling is the single activity I have spent the majority of my time playing doing.  I doubt travel time would even amount to anything for them when comparing.  Lucky them.

Happy 200th anniversary to me.

How many days played do you have and what is the single activity you think you have spent the most time doing?