I feel like this is how any MMO must be for the top players. Once you’ve learned game mechanics to the point that every aspect of the game turns into an efficiency simulator, it’s easy to get frustrated at details of the game that few notice.
Add micro transactions to the mix and there’s an awful concentration of the sunk cost fallacy. Good on him for being able to pull the brakes.
10,000+ hours is mind boggling to me. That’s ~416 full days, or 3.5 years at 8 hours every day. I’m sure the player has been playing for far longer and wasn’t pulling those kinds of hours in a short span like that, but it’s just crazy to me that anyone can rack up that much time in an MMO before becoming completely burnt out.
I had over 11k hrs in WoW when I quit. That was over the span of 12 years and definitely included some extended breaks, but there were also long periods of 6-10 hrs a day for extended periods.
Please don’t take this the wrong way but I’m sitting here genuinely going “what the fuck?!”. I’m happy for you in recognizing and killing the addiction even if it took you multiple attempts.
If I can implore people anything its to understand that the problem is addiction and it comes in many forms. To many people they quit one addiction and they move to another because as an example, gambling is not the problem. The unhealthy relationship to it is
I’m saying this as someone who is immensely close with a functional alcoholic and when they have “quit” the alcohol is simply replaced with something else. The addiction is the underlying problem.
As a rehabilitated Eve addict, I can tell you that it’s a lot of addiction. MMOs are about two things: people and gameplay.
In Eve, the PvE gameplay is awful. But the PvP is amazing and the people are amazing. Even though I haven’t logged in in years, I still talk to these people regularly. Like once or twice a month.
While they’re not my closest friends, I genuinely know them and feel I can share anything I need to get off my chest in a safe place that will hear and respond. Picking a good group of people in a game can make or break your experience.
After that, 10,000 hours of online social time doesn’t seem so bad compared to the alternative of being alone and still playing games.
Is it good for you? Absolutely not. But hopefully that puts some perspective on MMOs.
I think you're jumping to conclusions a little too quickly, there. Was my time in WoW habitual? Definitely. Escapism? Sure. Unhealthy? More often yes than no. Every time I quit, it was because the game wasn't fun anymore.
I'm sure you mean well, but you may not want to draw conclusions based on a couple lines of text.
I played the game a lot as a wee lad, but I genuinely cannot fathom how people still play GMS these days. Every few years I’ll play for a few weeks on a private server for nostalgias sake. I’m quickly reminded why I stopped playing in the first place though.
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