Well, thank you for that run. You probably can't imagine how tired I was, or can you ?
Originally I wanted to get up on 8-9 in the morning again - which would have given me exactly 4-5 hours of sleep ... I decided to ... expand it regardless into waking up on 10 in the morning, which was much, much better ... I was still tired throughout 2/3 of the day ...
The small event I wanted to go to had something to do with ... what's the word ? intellectual giftedness ? It was carried out my
Mensa, and there were several lectures/speeches presenting several topics within the broad field of intellectuual giftedness (see the Wikipedia article for more on the matter).
I was particularly keen on witnessing a speech regarding high sensitivity & high intellectual giftedness. The view spreads slowly, but steadily, more and more that both often appear in an conjunction. HSPs are often intellectual gifted ones, too.
And that was interesting - as was a much later speech regarding adults (age 40+) who had *never* been found to actually be intellectually gifted ... And who had often suffered because of that. The speaker showed it by her own example that intellectually gifted people often, imho far too often get dominated by "normal" people - and are as a result losing themselves. Because they are so much more different, especially in their giftedness, the pressure is so more higher to adapt to the normal people the more different they are. The speaker's book had the example of a cat having learned to live as a dog, but suddenly awaking and noticing to *actually* be a cat, and *not* a dog , as the title.
And this phenomenon works fopr both highly sensitive people and intellectually gifted people - and in very often cases people are both at the same time !
Okay, back into online gaming : I finally bought myself the "Standard Edition" of SWTOR.
It is going to F2P at one point this fall, so I thought : Why not get the benefit of having a full game version of it ? The game alone has become very cheap.
But the "Game Time Cards" are not ! But I need at least 1 to become a kind of "Premium" account - similar to DDO, isn't it ?
Well, that's not the end ! If you read through SWTOR descriptions, you'll notice how similar a lot of things are.
SWTOR - DDO
Cartel Coins = Turbine Points
VIP = Premium
F2P = F2P
For SWTOR, however, there is no "middle thing" / middle tier like the DDO Premium.
The only thing behaving like the DDO Premium with the buy of Turbine Point Cards is the Game Time Card of SWTOR - if you use them in SWTOR, you automatically become Premium. You can cancel this (the paid playing time, paid either with credit card, paypal or with an "Game Time Card") at any time, thus becoming F2P again - only that right now there is no F2P yet, only P2P.
So, with F2P not being there for SWTOR yet, this means that if you cancel, you are just on hiatus, paused, in limbo, in stasis, or how one would call it. You just can't play with a paused account now.
But the other stuff is soo much similar : Crafting is there, auction house - like thing is there, raids are there, PvP is there - they only have different names.
Even this is similar : P2P vs. F2P of SWTOR chart :
http://www.swtor.com/free/features
Seems to me as if there is kind of "industry standard" right now, regarding MMOs ...
And tomorrow I'll sleep far into the day !