[General Discussion] Quitting MMORPGs

I have to admit, I've been "addicted" to some MMO's in the past (Ultima Online, then Dark Age of Camelot, then WoW itself), but have somehow always managed to get myself out of that situation.

Surprisingly enough, it's often the game "shooting itself in the foot" that ultimately helps me to break the addiction.

For example, I played WoW for almost 6 months straight. The Level 1-59 content was awesome, because you could do quests, and there were enough of them that you didn't have to "grind" very often. But once I hit 60, it was all raid, raid, raid. And I don't know about you, but those raids got boring to me very, very quickly. Although I made alts, that didn't help to keep me in the game, and after that, I just stopped playing altogether.

For Dark Age of Camelot, another game I played on and off for 3 years, it was also because "the game got boring". But in this case, it was mostly because I was finding myself being forced to solo more and more. The reason was because this game has a very low population (the most I ever remember "seeing" online was about 1000 players per realm/server. But last time I played, the average was about 230 online at any given time), and unlike WoW, not every class can solo, or solo effectively anyway. There's no such thing as "bandages" or "food/drink" in DAOC to lower downtime, and I hated sitting on my ass for 2-3 minutes PER fight with a tank, or waiting on mana for a caster. And for the most part, those classes that could solo well, often weren't wanted in groups (such as necromancers, vampiirs, and to a lesser extent, warlocks, unless they spammed the group heal spell they can specialize in).

This kind of sucks because I loved DAOC's endgame stuff (Realm vs. Realm, where you could take keeps/towers and have big 100 on 100 battles if there were enough people on). Many players have begged the devs for DAOC to advertise more, to bring in more new players, and their European counterparts even made an awesome commercial for it, but sadly it seems the devs only want to keep the game alive long enough until Warhammer Online comes out, then I'm sure they're going to pull the plug on DAOC (or EA will pull the plug for them, since EA owns Mythic now).

I guess what I'm saying here is, the games can often "shoot themselves in the foot", if they continue to ignore players requests (or only listen to a select few), and keep making changes which alienates the playerbase (look at what happened to Star Wars Galaxies. That game had so much potential, but they just continually screwed it up).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by speculative

I agree. Plus, I play games as a diversion, so I don't want to run into the same kind of a-holes in a "virtual world" that I'm trying to take a vacation from in the "real world" and end up paying $ for it monthly ta boot! Ridiculous...

Man, that used to be my brother. When he lost his job, he used the rest of his money on paying for the cable internet bill (which I later had to foot later on because I used internet extensively as well), and playing MMO's. Wouldn't go get a job or anything, would just log in and play games. He even got to the point of taking my sister's comp and using both comps (and eating a ton of power, which he wasn't helping pay for) just to play one game (the 2nd comp was for a buffbot, which was notorious in DAOC).

Most people I know probably would've kicked this guy out. But my mom is too damn nice, and refused to do it (and we didn't make enough to move out yet either). And it pisses me off that he was such a damn freeloader (would eat a ton of our food, then didn't help with any chores either).

Luckily after about two years of doing this, he finally got his act together and got a job (and I hope he's making a lot, cause he owes my mom a lot of money) and stopped playing so much. But still, the fact that this game ended up doing that (and I'm sure it's done that to many others as well) kind of turned me off being such a hardcore gamer (aside from the endgame stuff pissing me off that is).

I'm all for having fun and playing games, but not to the point where it's a 'second job', and one you have to pay for to boot. Sociology/psychology/business majors, have fun studying this stuff

There's nowhere I can't reach.