180 Days for a BMW M3

In my last “passing through” review of the state of Need for Speed World, I mentioned my obsessive experiment with the daily gem hunt and the fact that they added achievements to the game.

The first part, the gem hunt, involved me trying to find out if the statement that “each consecutive day gives better rewards” was actually true or not.

It sort of was.

At about day 20 you start getting 4 star rewards, which are best-in-game items.  But you still continue to get 1 star rewards, which is of a level you can purchase outright from the in-game vendor, most of the time well past day 100.

112 Days for This?

At least you have the option of selling them back for some in-game cash, which so far can still be used to purchase some actual vehicles.

As for the second part, the addition of achievements… well, if ever a game needed them, Need for Speed World was that game.  Racing is a reasonable genre to have them.  And they did keep me playing for a while longer as they had me hooked for one particular achievement.  If you do the gem hunt every day for 180 days straight, you get a special car.  And since I was past 100 days already… they gave me credit for the part of my streak that pre-dated the achievement… I felt I might as well press on!

Last week I made it, I hit the 180 day mark and got the achievement.

Now it was time to collect my new car!  It turned out to be a BMW M3 E92 with special “Achievement Edition” vinyl.

New Car

Not a bad looking car.  I wasn’t big on the color for it, but NFSW has decent customization tools if nothing else., so I went for a blue color.

More my hue

It isn’t a bad car.  I like the looks well enough.  It is a B class racer by default, with a “very low for its class” 508 rating.  Not outstanding by default, but decent.  I took it out for a few test races.

M3 in the race

It handles nicely, though it lacks something in the acceleration department.  Handling can be an equalizer if you can carry your speed through corners, so I thought I would try to boost that a little bit.  However, no matter which 4-star parts I added to the car… such as a suspension upgrade that indicates it should improve handling by 19%… the handling stat got worse rather than better.

So I drove around somet more, swapped over to my Porsche 914 for a bit to compare (the Porsche wins), logged off and… aside from a quick exception to take a screen shot… stopped logging in.

Which sort of demonstrates the down side of daily quests and the like.  When you have dedicated a consistent effort to a goal like this… and the same thing happened to me after doing the Argent Tournament stuff… some level of burn out (heh) is often the result.

I will probably be back for a visit in a few months.  But for now I feel “done” with the game.

Waiting for the Next Rift World Event…

I played quite a bit of Rift this past weekend.

And as I ran through Meridian for various reasons, I noticed that now-lonely corner at the front of the city where the NPCs for any given world event seem to hang out.

No daily quest for me?

I have only seen two world events, but I assume that is where the world event NPCs always go.  Like a lot of places, there is really only big empty patch of land where the circus can setup when it comes to town.

And, in my missing Rift world events, I guess that I am confirming that I like daily quests.

I suppose that is no surprise after I did those daily fishing quests to get exalted reputation with the Kalu’ak so I could buy their special fishing pole and the pet penguin.  Likewise the whole cooking daily routine and the Argent Tournament thing.

Faction-riffic

The key, for me, is having limited goals.

For example, I never spent much time doing the daily quests that they put in at the end of the Burning Crusade expansion.  There was something of an open-ended goal with that as I recall.  Maybe.  I cannot even remember the name of the place where those quests were… way up at the north end of the Eastern Kingdoms.

And world events in Rift fit that limited niche.  They are limited in duration and there are generally only a couple of items I want from the event vendor.

So while there are, in fact, daily quests in every zone in the game, generally setting me to the task of closing so many rifts or slaying so many rift creatures, they do not fill that same slot in my mind.  I will pick those up when I go out to adventure in a zone, but I never go out to a zone just to do those, even when our guild quest is related.

So I am waiting for the next Rift world event.