In regards to pacing your weapons upgrades, the game is really structured with a lot of bottlenecks if you stick to one or two weapon types (though new armor sets open with every single boss you beat, so you have to thing more critically). Sometimes you'll go on for a while with absolutely nothing available, then 7 or 8 new weapon options will appear all at once. At least, that's what happened to me.

I'll can probably join u. My name is KLASH btw. What's your name?

http://www.vg247.com/2010/07/07/over-1-million-hours-logged-from-monster-hunter-tri-players/

Not too shabby...

I beat that bastard Alatreon this morning. I'm especially happy after trying all day yesterday. Now it is time for me to do some sleep bombing on him. I just need to upgrade my Hypnos to Morpheous and find a Gunner buddy(anybody over HR 51 preferrably up for it?) I would actually try getting in to gunning myself, but it seems like too much work I would have to invest in my farm. I definitely wouldn't want to spend more than an hour or two in single player daily. 

Name: Hatter
ID#: QC73N2

That is my online name and ID. So just search for me. I am just going to go on greed one and a deserted gate and make a lagia event quest ho room for high rank. If anyone High rank would like to join us feel free.

I'll add u the next time I get on, I tried yesterday,but, u were questing.

I wanted to make a empty room for Sea power, but it literally filled up in a minute. Your room was already full and mine got filled real fast. I had some successful runs got more shell shockers and a ruby.

Dang HR 141 though. Sea Power must be a breeze.

I feel like I have reached a frozen, tedious, point in the game, after 200 hrs it has been. I have a ton of weapons to upgrade/make, and the only way to upgrade/make them is to kill the same monsters  again and again until I get the three or four of the very rare items that I need. I do want to make some Alatreon stuff, but I've only killed him once out of four tries today. In the one game, I was trying to get him asleep, but a player kept whacking me with his longsword(the Sea Power event one forgot its name) so I could barely get any attacks in, then when I did get him asleep, that same player woke him up with a small bomb before I could do the bombing with Large Bomb pluses  . Now this wasn't one time, but the three times I got him asleep. We ended up losing with three deaths two from this player. :( Then in another one, I found a group who was in the HR100s, which I tend to stay away from, because I like to stay within my experience range. Anyway so it was three gunners and me with a measly SNS. We(rather they lol I just helped support a few bombs) broke his horns and wings, but ran out of time. Yeah that was very frustrating. :( The last two I went with the simple, straight forward method, brought out my axe, in order to help somebody get their urgent completed. We lost the first, and won the second. Please do note, that his quest tends to take up the whole 50 minutes, so that was about three hours of losses on top of the hour or so of preparation/finding a city. So yeah, I feel like I want to do more, but it will just take me hours just to finish a simple task like getting two lagi horns to upgrade my High Bolt Axe for example. I think I might get into gunning to freshen things up, but the learning curve seems huge. I might as well make a new character and clock in 200 more hours just to figure it out at a high enough proficiency. 

Still can't beat the diablos ^^

I think I'm done with the Lagiacrus, I have defeated it over 100 times and I got the title. I have 3 Lagia sapphires and I used 3 already. I going to start back on Alatreon and try to get 3 skypiercers for the Altreon Revolution Great Sword.