Darth Hater

Holidays are devoted to spending time with family inside the game as well as out. I have been playing a lot of SWTOR with my father-in-law who is 63. We've been raiding together for over 6 years (WoW prior to SWTOR release) and we are leveling one set of Sith toons together and running Ops on both the Empire and Republic side with my wife. My 15- year old son will usually join in on the Republic Ops and my 12 year old daughter now has a premeire account that she is leveling her "female Han Solo" on.  So between Decemvber 23- 31, there are usually 2- 5 people logged into the game at any given time, lol.

Holidays don't really affect my gaming that much.  Holidays or not, I play my games when I feel like it and when I have spare time.  I suppose I have a little more spare time during the holidays, so maybe I game a little more.

I'm 23 and work 40 hour 5 day week's and maintain a relationship as well, but with a fine balance of allowing time together with family and friends, and time to do my own thing, I find that on the nights I am free, I play for a good 4-5 hours or so. I have friends spread across swtor, guild wars 2 and a few other games, but I've been fortunate enough to gain not just a "gaming" buddy with them, but real life friendships with them too.

Say for example over the Christmas holidays, I spent Fri 21st about 5-6 hours online, then towards the end of Christmas day night time when I was back home (empty house) I played for a few hours and then the same today (boxing day).

Maintaining a level of balance between a real life (job, family, relationship, social life) and a programmed game can be difficult to maintain, but we need to remember that family and our loved ones should always come first

I'm atypical. I'm almost 50 and a widower with my only child grown and married. Thus, I game as much as I want over the holidays as my cats don't care what I'm doing. ^_^ I'll attend my immediate family's events, but that's it. I do occasionally share in-game holidays with my son and his wife (they both game), but it just depends on schedules.

I like repeating in-game events, be it real world holiday analogs or made up annual events. That way if I have to miss an event one year I can catch it (or 'catch up') the next year.

[Rant: on] I really disliked SWTOR's two one-time events because I was unable to be a part of both due to work commitments. It is frustrating to know you'll never be to get those achievements because of things beyond your control. Also, it is annoying that the devs have wasted development time on two one-time events when the game still needs other areas of work. It would be different if the rakghoul plague popped up at random times or the grand acquisition race reoccurred, now and then. But really, when you're struggling to retain subscribers you have events that if missed cause people to go, 'well, I missed that, no sense in logging in now'. :sigh: [Rant: off]

Not to stray off topic, but random events is what I hope most for this game. Not the disconnected "who cares" events in gw2, but events that are connected to the larger world ala' rift. I heard an interview with the head pvp dev, and he said that might be the way they want to in corporate Open world pvp into the game, that is if the engine can handle it.

Back to the topic, I do game during Christmas holidays...it's like a tradition for me to bunker down at my computer, and game whilst not with the fam. I played dishonored over the holiday. Great game.