Playing AFK

I have played a fair amount of Jade Dynasty lately, but at the same time not spent that much time active at the keyboard in the game. It is very much a game where you can do other things at the same time and every now and then have a peek at what is happening.

There are always people AFK and meditating in any city area, gaining XP

The auto-routing features makes your character go anywhere there is a specific target (NPC, mob type, place on map etc) – the only worry would be if he/she passed some high level nasty mobs that might kill the character. However, so far that has very seldom happened. Most mobs do not aggro unless attacked and most of the few that do you can still outrun.

Then there is the Invigorate features, which puts your character on auto-pilot and which may go and kill mobs in the surroundings. There is a fair amount of settings to play around with here. On top of this, I discovered that the quest God’s Gift which I mentioned in a previous post, is repeatable. That is you can get double XP and serious attack and defense buffs that last at least 2 hours multiple times. From reading the forums it seems that you can pick that quest once per day.  I did not know that, so I have played most of the time with “normal” XP. The drawback with the double XP is that one gets less loot/money for the XP gained, which potentially could lead into financial issues.

With double XP and serious buffing in place, it is easy to go auto-pilot on higher level mobs

It feels a bit strange playing a game where you most of the time are perhaps not controlling your character directly. Instead it works a bit like a pet in some other MMOs – you set up its behaviour and off it goes and does its thing without you thinking too much about it.

Overall this has worked reasonably fine for me lately. I have not had a huge amount of dedicated online game time available, but a little bit time here and there. This has worked out ok I think. I have also used the dream feature of the game a bit to get a some progression while completely offline as well.

It becomes a quite different game and perhaps not so much a traditional MMO. But I would definitely have stopped playing the game if these auto features had not been there – there are so many kill 10/15/20/30 mobs type of quests, combined with a bit of fedex type. There are some neat story pieces here and there, but overall kill-more-mobs view dominates the PvE gameplay.

I have not tried PvP yet; it is only enabled from level 30 and as far as I understand it there is no or limited barriers for high level players to go and kill low levels ones; plus that you can lose items if you get killed. SInce both PvP and PvE is available I suspect though that most players will level up in PvE realms and once they get to high level jump over to the PvP realms.

I prefer more e-sport type of PvP, so I am not so sure I will spend much effort on that part.  But time will tell.

And yes, I have been playing and leveling while writing this post…

Bored of regular mob killing? Lure a big boss into populated areas and get everyone to attack him for 15 minutes until he dies...