Have you ever tapped someone lightly on the shoulder to attract their attention, only to have them whip around and ask you, in an aggressive manner, what you wanted? Do you know people with whom you will never be able to have a serious conversation? Imagine if everyone around you, at least in your mind, fit into one of these two groups. Imagine if the setting was an MMPORG called RuneScape.
I am well aware of the existence of bots at a variety of levels and places, and for the purposes of this article, I am excluding them from my definition of "players," which I will take to be everyone else.
Although I could call these soon-to-be-named groups clowns and jokers without fear of retribution, I will have the dignity not to. After all, what decent efficiency clown would have time to bother responding to such accusations? Moreover, many socialites, should they happen to find out about my claims of getting faster xp hanging upside-down from a tree eating grapes with one hand strapped behind my back, might just ponder, "What is a tip-it-times?" But I promised I wouldn't get into that, so let's move on.
I'll proceed with the less prejudiced term: groups. The first of the two groups contain the players whose sole ambition is to gain as much experience as possible, and to do so as quickly as they can no matter what it takes, within the bounds of the rules. The other consists of people you see at various places, such as Lumbridge, the Grand Exchange, or Daemonheim, chatting and doing not much at all in terms of skilling. They might throw a fish or a few logs onto a raging bonfire, but in general their experience gains are minimal, especially compared to the former.
I sincerely assure you that I have nothing against either of these styles of play. The challenge of getting as much experience in an hour as possible is a thrill I have sought out several times and enjoyed thoroughly. I will probably do it several times more. Sprinting madly through dungeons with the aim of finishing them in the best possible time will always be my favorite form of RuneScape sport. And occasionally, hanging around the Grand Exchange chatting with people and not doing much skilling is a nice experience without experience, if you will.
When I signed up for the hundred-meter dash, I had no intention of running in a marathon, yet my participation almost seems expected. For instance, from my experience, private messages not pertinent to gaining experience or money are often ignored or simply never sent. I make a conscious decision that my experience rate will be lower if I keep going to YouTube to put on music, pay half my attention to watching TV, or chatting with other RuneScapers, in any of the four different chat channels I use.
Alas, similarly, the novelty of hanging around chatting somewhere also wears off rather quickly. For me it degenerates into the infamous debate in which each person insists on doing what the other wants to do. Eventually even the creative supply of more exotic smileys ("8D" for instance) is exhausted, and the repetition of "Oo" as the cutest comment in the world becomes monotonous and predictable.
Whatever your objective may be, I'll respect it, jokes aside. If it makes you feel better, you can ridicule my preference of somewhat of a compromise between the two as indecisiveness. For some reason, I haven't met many people with a similar mentality, and I'm feeling a little lonely about it. It would be a very silly lie to say that I am not promoting my agenda here, so I'll conclude with the following. It's summer, and I know you'll have some extra time at your hands at one point or another. Open your eyes to another style of play, and you might even decide to keep it.
