Ten months have come to pass from my last post. I had to go back and read my own blog as a reminder of what I was talking about almost a year ago and where I left off.

Last subject was related to the MMORPG Vindictus. I stopped playing for a while and I moved to Call Of Duty Black Ops and Firefall. Both pretty entertaining and allow me to unwind from the day and relax.

But about 3 weeks ago I came back to Vindictus and found that there are several new people (at least on my latest experience). When I temporarily stopped playing, there were several people that migrated from another Nexon multiplayer game that was terminated. At that time all the players had a one chance to get a new character and level him/her directly to 50. I guess it was fair for the people from the other game, but it skewed the game a little as several of these relatively high level players did not know what to do. Marketplace was also affected as nobody wanted lower level armor, weapons or other items and it was harder to "offload" a lot of those item collected during quests. Also, I had to work hard on leveling up as I do not put any money to purchase special packages and items in the real world shop in order to advance faster, and here you had "instant level 50" given away. Don't get me wrong, I took advantage of it too and got a Karok and a Kay on two different accounts, but they have been just sitting there. I guess I got attached to my Lann and as I do not play for hours on end day after day, it takes me relatively long time to go through the storyline and level up.

It appears things are a lot more balanced now and I have been able to sell everything I have been posting on the online marketplace, freeing some needed slots in my storage chest without having to just drop (throw away) items.

As I mentioned, about three weeks ago I decided to play again and in this time I went from level 59 to 64. New quests and the fact that I am now approaching the missions more strategically instead of just "face-tanking" made things a little easier for me (duh).

The other aspect that I really enjoyed has been finding some people that are a little more social and they actually engage in a conversation other than "sup, thank you, good job, ...". you get the drift. And even more than that, I found someone willing to role play a little more and talk about other things, not only strategies to run a mission. That makes the game so much more enjoyable and rewarding in itself. I know somebody can consider the characters already set and there is not much space for role plying as Vindictus is not a true free-world RPG, but there is still a lot of flexibility on how the players can interact among themselves.

I am not playing the game just for the sake of getting to level 80 grinding mission after mission. I am playing to relax, escape somehow to a different world.

Why are you playing Vindictus?