MMORPG.com Jade Dynasty Correspondent Segun Adewumi continues to chronicle his adventures in this F2P MMO.

Jade Dynasty still has the ability to surprise me, and I love it for that. I’ve said before that Jade is a lot like Final Fantasy XI, in that everything possible is not always obvious. In Jade, the easiest and perhaps the quickest way to make money is to sell the provisions you get as drops. Every fifteen levels you get a new set of four provisions, and they sell for decent money especially the higher level grade provisions. But you can also turn in provisions and get honor. Honor or reputation works rather similarly to World of Warcraft in that the more reputation you have, the more it opens up to more loot. I started playing Ettarre again and got a new esper. Because each esper can be upgraded by getting an Esper Tome and an Esper Accessory to make it even more powerful during invigorate. Searching through the forums it became apparent to me that the best way to get both of these was through quests I could get if my honor reputation was high enough. But for as long as I’ve known about it I couldn’t seem to turn in the provisions for rep, I’d get a log full notice and that would be that. Finally I read a post that says I can only have eight quests as a maximum. Jade lets you have twenty or so in your log so I’ve always had fifteen to twenty or so in quest log, so that explained why I kept getting an error.

Read A Day in the Life.

Prince reads the poem to everyone who attempts to kill it male or female.

Never mind. What I thought was a off-topic post is really on-topic.

 My Jadeon is just shy of 103, but I have switched to playing a Balo since the expansion was released. There's a bit of a bait and switch-- at 90, you stop getting double exp and buffs from Tanis Ka, you start using a ton of Esper energy whenever you turn on invigorate, and you lose 6% of your experience when you die. I didn't hit a leveling wall, really, until I got to 90. 90 to 105 has turned out to be a little harder than I expected from what came before, at least in part because of the things I just mentioned.

And it's gotten just impossible since I started playing a different character instead. 

I used lower level characters to farm the materials for crafting, but you can also buy them from the Shady Dealer in Sunstream, if you're just rolling in cash. I found crafting to be a huge time- and gold-sink, but it wasn't as painful as the old EQ crafting. 

There are so many little things to do in JD that it's really hard to imagine logging in and feeling like there was nothing to do. I came late to the Battlegrounds scene, but that's a lot of fun, for instance, and they've added some odd new features with the expansion, like the Garden, and the achievements window that gives you some new goals to shoot for, if you're goal oriented like that.

That poem reminds me of a chinese song called "Tong Hua" xD Well, it sounds exactly like a translation of the chorus in the song anyway. =)

Sometimes I wonder about people who play these games.  They are such grinders once past mid level, I don't know how they can stand killing the same npc over and over again because quests almost disappear at that stage and buying from the item shop is no longer avoidable.

And of course if you do actually get to max level there is nothing for you to do.

If I had to play a PW game it would be Perfect World, at least you can fly in that game.