Continuing on with checking out recently bought games, I gave PegIdle a try, to fill that void left now that I’m not leaving Idle Champions constantly running.

The concept is fairly simple: it’s Peggle, except that once you start upgrading balls, they drop automatically, so you can just leave it running and have it gather gold and points in the background, occasionally dropping in to upgrade stuff and maybe shoot some balls manually. There are a bunch of different ball types, which have to be unlocked with increasing amounts of gold, and they often have different properties (more or less bounciness, splitting apart, etc.), and can be upgraded to give more gold on hitting a gold peg or drop more frequently. There are different types of pegs, some of which grant gold or ‘prestige points’ or temporary buffs, and buckets at the bottom that grant you gold if you land in them.

The tension here seems to be based around how to optimally gain gold. Higher tiers of balls grant way more gold when they hit a gold peg, so it would seem like you would want to focus on using the higher tier balls as much as possible, even disabling the lower tier balls once the difference in gold earned is too great, to prevent them from bringing down your earnings. But, it doesn’t take long before you realize that the real goal is prestige points, because they’re what let you buy permanent upgrades whenever you decide to do a prestige reset and start over, and those upgrades make a huge difference. So really, you want to gain as many prestige points as quickly as possible, by clearing boards as quickly as possible, and to do that you want as many balls active as you can possibly get, even if they’re low-earning ones. Gold only really matters in getting to the point where you can flood the screen with balls and clear stages in only a few seconds, which doesn’t really take that long.

So, there’s not really as much strategy to it as it first seemed. The other slight disappointment is that it’s not really Peggle, as it lacks that joy of pulling off that really sick high-scoring shot yourself. It’s really more pachinko than Peggle. It probably won’t last too long either; after a couple days I already have a good chunk of the prestige upgrades, and the rest of them don’t really change the formula too much, just increasing the numbers more, so I may not even bother finishing the upgrades. But, you know, that’s fine too, I don’t need another game that’s going to demand my attention Forever. It has its flaws, but it’s cheap and I got some decent fun out of it for those couple of days.

Steam keeps track of how much time you spend playing a game, and by far the largest one on my list is, uh…

I’ve been ‘playing’ it for a few years now, but Idle Champions is an ‘idle’ game, so very little of that is actual, hands-on playing of it. Most of that occurs early on when you’re just starting out, where the basic gameplay is to select an adventure, set up some party members in a formation, and then keep buying upgrades for them and tweaking things a bit (swapping members in and out, moving them around, clicking ‘ultimate’ attacks) when things start getting more difficult. It actually requires a fair bit of your attention at this point, managing all of this. Eventually you get some ‘familiars’ which can automate tasks for you, such as levelling up party members and clicking on the playfield, and ‘modron cores’ which can automate setting up a formation and restarting the adventure when you hit a certain point. With enough of these combined, the game then basically plays itself automatically, just continually running an adventure over and over again with no intervention required.

But, you might ask, why would you even do so? Well, there is Stuff to earn… Your party’s strength is affected by a lot of things, including the ‘item level’ of the equipment they wear. The item level is raised by either using blacksmithing contracts, which come from chests, or finding duplicate pieces of gear, also from chests. Chests can be bought with ‘gems’, and gems are earned by defeating bosses, which you do by…running an adventure over and over again. Hence, with the familiars and modron cores you can just set it up and let it run in the background and just check in on it every once in a while to buy stuff.

But, there’s other stuff to keep track of as well. A big source of your party’s strength will also come from legendary items, which requires earning dragon scales, which requires you to interrupt your gem farming and run a special adventure once a day for a week for each batch of scales. New heroes get added on a roughly monthly basis, and you have to run a bunch of adventures to unlock them and get them geared up. Special events occur every once in a while which require you to log in once per day for a week to open a special chest, or keep the game running to passively earn some new temporary currency. There is now a daily login to earn a new ‘platinum’ currency which can be used to buy some stuff that would normally require real currency.

All of this kind of begs the obvious question of ‘why’ though, and that’s where the FOMO starts to kick in in subtly interconnected ways. Why would you want to unlock a new hero? Well, new heroes are sometimes essential for the new ‘meta’ to make for a stronger party that can beat the more difficult adventures. Why would you want to log in daily to unlock a special chest? Well, sometimes you can get valuable things like a Potion of Polish from them, and you have to do so at least four times to get the Bonus reward, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right? Why would you want to passively gather a new currency? Well, it’s the easiest way to get pigment buffs which raise your party’s strength significantly… They’ve done a great job of giving you a whole bunch of reasons to log in and play the game regularly, in order to help you…become better at continuing to play the game. There is no final goal to it all, as they’re regularly adding new campaigns and adventures, so you still feel this constant need to prepare.

The problem is that this starts to nibble away more and more bits of your time. You can leave it running in the background 99% of the time, but it still takes a non-zero amount of time to do that dragon scale run, to spend the currencies and buy the upgrades, to unlock that hero, to do the daily chest claim, etc., and if I spend a half hour each day doing these maintenance tasks, that’s a half hour less time for other games or tasks. The interconnectedness makes it difficult to limit your interaction, too. Oh, maybe I’ll just fire it up once a month to get the new hero. Except that I’m going to need chests to equip the hero, so I could just leave it running to farm gems for the chests. But if it’s running anyway, I may as well check the daily login… And before long it’s back to being a time suck again.

So, ultimately, I think saying goodbye to Idle Champions means quitting cold turkey. It wasn’t really a waste of time, but I think for me it’s the only practical way to get off this FOMO ride.