I was hoping for time. While there's always a "race", the length of that race has a wide variance. It could be a couple weeks. It could be a few months. When it's not clear what others plans are, I'm still going through the motions trying to get myself into the best position I can be for what I'm willing to do - that duration of time is often the most fun I have in this game as the game is a far richer place pre-Arc (since post-Arc all other strategic decisions get dwarfed by get Arc, use it to fuel everything else). Once the Arc drops, it's time to take stock of the world and whether I really want to keep playing it. When that happened 4 days in I went through that process and it was an easy decision to stop. When that Arc got nuked from orbit, I'd already broken the rhythm and taken stock of how I wasn't pleased with how I'd started the world - hence it's difficult to rush back in even if the state of things is back to "well I've got time, but who knows how much?"