If you've been reading this blog for a while, or if you've delved into the older posts, you'll know that I was until recently involved in the hobby of flying radio controlled airplanes. It was a fun hobby, but due to various factors (money, time, politics) I've left the hobby, but today I'm going to start this post by talking a little about the history and evolution of the hobby as I understand it. It's an old hobby, dating back way, way before I was born, but I've talked to people that have been into it for over 30 years and I've read a ton on it as well.

It used to be, back before, say the 1970s, that if you wanted to fly a radio controlled airplane, you needed to build it yourself. From a bunch of wood. You either got plans and cut the pieces you needed based on the plans, assembling them together with various adhesives, or, you knew what you needed and didn't even use plans. As you can imagine this required a fairly large amount of "crafting" skill, patience, and knowledge of tools and techniques. A lot of people really like building things, so this was cool. Gave them something they enjoyed, then they got to fly the plane. Other people, I'm sure, didn't like the building as much, but really wanted to have something they could fly, so they soldiered through it.

As time went on, companies took notice that people were doing this hobby, and so they started producing kits of airplanes. This gave you pretty much everything you needed for the basic airplane - all the wood and usually some of the other parts. In the beginning you still had to do a lot of cutting, but as time went on, die cutting (and very eventually laser cutting) was introduced, eliminating the cutting of parts steps. This was still building, and satisfied a lot of the "builder" types, but was a lot less work than scratch building, so satisfied more of the people that didn't enjoy building as much.

More time passes, and companies take note that a lot of people really just want to fly, and so "ARFs", or "Almost Ready to Fly" airplanes were introduced. This gave you a (mostly) fully built airplane, leaving you to just install the motor and electronics needed to control the airplane. Instead of months, time from purchase to flying was reduced to days or a week at most. The early ARFs were pretty rough and you still had to do quite a bit of work, but it wasn't nearly as much as building from a kit. Nowadays, with modern ARF airplanes, the time from purchase to flying is pretty much anywhere from about 4-5 hours to maybe 15 or so for a large, complex airplane.

Now you'd think everyone in the hobby could be happy about this. The guys that just want to focus on flying can get ARFs and fly sooner, and the guys that love the building aspect can still build their airplanes and then fly 'em when they're done, right? Well, yeah, they do, but a decent number of the builder types really look down on the guys that only have ARFs. Or, more correctly, their airplanes. They say the planes aren't as good, that you didn't "earn" it, and so forth. It's not usually mean-spirited, it's more friendly teasing, honestly, but still. Just be happy someone's in the hobby and enjoying themselves, right? Heh.

You probably noticed this post is categorized/tagged "gaming" and by now you probably think I'm on crack or something. I'm not. This was a long, wall-of-text analogy.

Back in the early days of MMOs if you wanted a high level character, well, you made it yourself. You leveled that sucker up. And it was good! Hell levels in EQ1? We loved em! (not really.) The other option was, well, the black/grey market of "RMT" and buying accounts. Variously either against the TOS of the games, or at the very least looked down upon by a lot of players. It was honestly best if you'd self-leveled a character before you tried to drive a max-level character, no matter the game. But still, once you'd been through the levels, if you wanted to try something else, you might want to shorten the time to higher levels.

The first instance I can think of where a company directly served this desire was EA/OSI offering the "Advanced Character Service" in Ultima Online. You could, for a fee, buy a mid-"level" (no levels in UO, all skill-based game) character, chosen from about half a dozen different templates. These were nowhere near max-skill characters, they were (are?) just mid-grade characters so you can at least start doing something cool instead of grinding up from no skills at all. It was pretty cool. I was a hardcore UO veteran by the time this service came online and I used it a few times! Oh, but the backlash from players was horrible! They said it was the doom of the game, etc, etc, etc. Of course that was around 6-7 years ago and the game's still going strong-ish...

Of course now the de facto way to skip leveling is just go to to the black RMT market and buy an account. It's against the TOS of almost every MMO (UO, Warhammer, and EVE are notable exceptions), but people still do it en masse. I do it. Heh. I'll always self-level my first character, but after that, yeah, sometimes I wanna skip the "rats and bats" phase and get to the "really f'ing big rats and bats" phase!

Now of course, some people really still like the "building" thing. Leveling from zero, clawing up to max. That's cool! Go for it man! This is a hobby, we're both enjoying it... Relax. :) I don't see why the different playstyles have to be enemies.

This post has been inspired by "Would you buy levels in a MMORPG?" at We Fly Spitfires. To which my simple answer is, "yes!".

So... are you a builder or a flyer?