200m Mining xp

Oh hey time for me to talk about that thing I did last week. Those who know me (who am I kidding no one really knows me) know that I've played RuneScape off and on as an f2p pure since 2005 and that the accomplishment I'm most proud of was reaching the 85 mining milestone in the last quarter of 2006. Mining's changed a lot since 06, but even as recently as 2015 I still felt some level of accomplishment from reaching milestones in the skill (2015 being when I 99'd mining followed by half my other skills). 13.034 million xp, that's a pretty big number and it's around 4x larger than the xp required to hit 85. 200m is numerically equivalent to getting 99 mining over 15 times (200m also being the hard cap on experience in one skill in RuneScape). Yet despite finally achieving the thing I always considered to be a far off goal for the future, I still feel like I've achieved nothing of value.

For the better part of the last 4 years I've played RuneScape daily, averaging probably 3 hours a day.  That's a lot of playtime in a game that as is already doesn't have that much engaging content beyond community interaction, and I intentionally limit myself to free to play simply because becoming a member at this point would devalue the entirety of the time spent to reach my milestones without membership. There's other reasons as well, probably the biggest of those being that I don't actually like MMO's at all and RuneScape is the only one I know of that doesn't completely paywall you after x time playing and lets you continue to rack up experience among other things just for the sake of leveling. It also helps that most of the leveling is just low effort time consuming stuff which makes it the perfect game for me to just boot up and play casually while I watch other things. It's very low effort multitask friendly gameplay is a huge part of my playtime, most other games require too much focus to effectively play while trying to watch visual media.

Because I play the game so casually nowadays I honestly stopped feeling like my increasingly high xp values had any meaning to them beyond just being numbers that kinda reflect time spent playing but not really. Even as early as 2017 I was self proclaiming myself as a casual player within the f2p community despite my rapidly increasing rankings. Others seem to agree that rankings within RuneScape itself mostly comes down to consistent time played per day, but then how does one climb the ladder to even have a hope to catch people who've played for 10+ years? Well the answer is you start to break apart the game mechanics and figure out exactly how much you can do at once in game to gather xp across multiple skills in the same time, and you start figuring out xp rates for everything. I'd started tracking my xp rates for doing various actions as early as 07 and still have an old outdated notepad file from 2010 on xp rates that are no longer even relevant.

I ended up eventually finding more like minded people who had already figured out all of this stuff for old school and had brought some of their methodology to RS3. They use EHP (efficient hours played) as a rating to determine playtime by taking your experience in individual skills and dividing it by the optimal xp/h for your level (taking into account that a level 30 woodcutter will cut slower than a level 90 one and can't access higher level tools, amongst other things). The xp/h is subjective to being "within reason" which generally means anything that costs more than 25gp per xp as well as methods that are incredibly taxing and difficult to execute over long periods of time. Rune platebodies pre smithing rework were not considered EHP due to absurd cost, and cutting willows while both fletching and firemaking but also alching while proven doable for an hour at an optimal rate was by consensus agreed to be far too ridiculous to maintain for any significant length of time purely because it took the person who submitted the method about 22 attempts to even record herself doing it for an hour.

For the last two years I've adapted my playstyle to take EHP into consideration, and since then my playtime average per day has probably been closer to 5 hours a day. Hell I was even using methods that are faster than EHP with shooting stars and evil trees (neither are considered EHP due to limited availability and daily caps). I kinda fell into this trap where all of a sudden I felt compelled to play as efficiently as possible for as long as possible to reach my goals. I'm still only playing when I have things to watch but what ended up happening is I just found more things to watch to make up for how fast I was burning through videos. I literally follow four different D&D/tabletop campaigns and have a fifth queued that I meant to watch months ago but literally ended up having a never ending 20+ videos to watch later in queue due to the best friends disbanding and me then following them individually and taking on like 10 more hours of video content per week on that alone. I could literally watch videos for 12 hours a day for the rest of the week and I'd still probably have a few things queued in my watch later playlist. I'm basically stuck in this never ending media cycle to the point where I'm literally picking and choosing from my sub feed and still ending up with too much on my plate.

With all that in mind, since the start of January I've mined the equivalent of 800+ hours of gameplay. Yes that's right, 800 hours. In the final month and a half leading up to 200m I was legitimately doing 8-12 hour days every day of the week even going as far as to wake myself up at 8am for the first time since university just to get an extra hour or two in. I actively pushed myself close to my limits for a whole weekend where no joke I was sleeping in 4 hour shifts just to capitalize on a rotating xp multiplier (which included me literally waking up at midnight to play 4 hours then sleeping and waking up at 8am for another 4 hours, there were other instances of this including a 2am wakeup and a 6am wakeup). The day after that I legitimately slept 11 hours straight and still woke up feeling drained. Despite all this crap I put myself through just to get to get myself to a stupid number, when I finally got to within a few hours from it I didn't feel pride or accomplishment, I honestly just wanted to get the number purely so I could stop pushing myself this hard. And that's what I did, I got my 200m and didn't even really plan a party, people were given two minutes of heads up and whoever showed up was there. What did I do an hour later? Did a daily challenge and then just finally took some time to play games I'd been itching to play for the last few months.

What did I play? Pixelmon's apparently back from being Cease and Desisted and I've wanted to jump back into that since forever so the next day I did Pixelmon, for 18 hours straight. Here's the kicker, the only reason I stopped playing Pixelmon after 18 hours is because the sun was literally rising because it was 6am. I literally wanted to keep playing otherwise. That's when it hit me, for over 4 months of my life I had literally forgotten what it was like to enjoy playing games. I haven't binged a game like this in a very long time, I wanna say Borderlands was the last game I pulled all nighters playing and that was back in 2013 I think. Yeah sure gen 7 of Pokemon I did some late nights but I never played through the night with it. Hell even before Borderlands all I can think of is the very first night I found Minecraft and ended up playing it from 8pm to 8am on a night where I had classes that afternoon. But now I feel myself even drained from that somewhat, and today I ended up doing some gardening outside for over 4 hours straight and probably would have kept going at that if not for me also needing to both cook and then shower because I smelled like ass after those 4 hours. I still want to try my hand at Sekiro, and to a lesser extent DMC 5 but I can probably hold off those till my birthday.

I guess if there's anything to take from this its that when I set myself to do something I'll basically destroy all semblance of schedule to get it done, but also I tend to lose myself in doing things a lot. I actually enjoy being busy, it's probably why everything I write ends up being 700 pages long.