MMOs:
I tried, I really did, but I can feel my soul draining when I play them.
Everything about these games are so anti fun yet so many people like them, it boggles my mind.
One of my most traumatic game experiences in particular was playing lineage 2.
It's been ages so forgot the exact circumstances but was basically was with someone else and we farmed a mob of monsters for a bit, if I recall lineage 2 was pretty hardcore so levelling and earning money was a big deal and a slow grind. For like 4 hours we did this, I was hitting heights of depression I never knew was possible, despite being someone who can happily spend most of the day playing vidya if allowed to at 30+ years of age (apparently long past the age you're supposed to have grown out of it and are doomed to be a boring fuck only into socially acceptable things like cars and football) for the first time I actually felt like I was wasting my youth and I should be doing something more with my life.
The dude then cheerfully said "another 2 hours and we will have enough xp to level up :D". My heart sank harder then the first time a girl I asked out laughed in my face. I made my excuses and logged off never to return, I had to gtfo.
I've tried other mmos, from wow guild wars 2 to euh..The one where you could spawn wings and fly in certain areas..Aeon? well whatever.
The ONLY mmos I ever enjoyed were Warhammer Online and Kotor, and apparently the reason for that is they are considered shitty by mmo standards. And even then I still eventually moved on to other games rather then devote the bulk of my time to them like seems to be the norm with mmos. I crave variety and tend to bounce from game to game depending on my mood, the idea of one single game dominating my time as if I was married to it is completely alien to me yet seems to be what you have to sign up for with mmos.
The only MMO I ever seriously tried was WoW back in 2006, when it was at the height of its popularity. It was even pre-expansions, and a few pals of mine were playing it too, both online pals and IRL pals, so I had people to play it with rather than having to team up with randos or trudge through it alone. I was also a teenager and hyped for it because the graphics looked good for the time, the world was huge, and there seemed to be so much to discover.
I quit 3 weeks into playing it even though I still had a full month of pre-paid game time left.
I had some fun at first, playing a female orc warrior, a pal played a male orc warlock, we'd do some retarded brother-sister RP for fun and occasionally team up with randos to tackle instances. The most fun memory of the game was teaming up with my pal and doing the brother-sister act, me tanking and him performing a supportive role, raiding dungeons together etc. Once we both joined some rando's raid party and the guy turned out to be an utter fucking retard. Completely stupid. Orc hunter who rushed enemies Leeroy Jenkins style while me and my pal were discussing battle tactics before engaging. He also didn't understand the warlock's portal spell and my pal had to explain it to him 5 times. It was a spell to teleport a party member from a different location to our current location, we wanted to do it to get a newly-joined healer to our position. "I will summon the portal, but for it to work you all need to touch it," my pal said.
"How do I touch it?" asked the retard.
"You right-click on it." said my pal.
"Oh. What does that do?"
"That will make you touch the portal."
"Oh. What for?"
"To teleport the healer to our position."
"Oh cool. How do we do that?"
"... by touching the portal I just summoned."
"Oh. How do we do that?"
"You right click on it."
"Cool. What does that do?"
"... it will teleport our healer here."
"Oh nice. How do we do that?"
"JUST RIGHT CLICK THE FUCKING PORTAL"
So yeah, that was fun. At some point my pal asked the retard "Do you know what incest is?" to which the retard replied "No." so my pal said "It's the way you were made." The retard commented that with: "Oh. Cool."
That was a hilarious raid.
I also remember making a male dwarven hunter on a different server and joining up with an IRL pal. There was some kind of yearly town market or something in the area at that time, which was cool. Lots of vendors and some activities to do and lots of players interacting with each other. That's kinda what I expected the main thing of MMOs to be. It's like an RPG but you also get to interact with other player characters pretty much all the time.
Well, no. Most of my time was spent grinding respawning mobs. I didn't get very far with the dwarven hunter, but my orc warrioress got to level 30 or something, but at that point the game got too repetitive for me. I had finished all the quests in the savannah region, killed all the major boss enemies there at least once, and went through the instance dungeon with my pal. I had seen all the content that region had to offer me. But when I progressed to the next region, enemies were still too strong for me. I would have had to return to the savannah and grind at least 2 more levels to comfortably explore the next region. Also, my friends on both servers were starting to out-level me because they devoted more time to the game than I did.
That's the point when I realized MMOs were shit grindfests. Playing with pals is fun, sure, as is interacting with other players. But if you want to keep up with your pals or your guildmates, you need to play at least one or two hours every day, you need to devote entire evenings to playing WoW and nothing else, otherwise everyone you know will out-level you. And a lot of your time will be spent grinding the ever-same respawning mobs because the rate of XP gain is so low. Fucking lame.
Completely lost interest in the genre after that, especially since most games were subscription based and I was a teenager without a credit card, so begging dad for his CC just to play a game that is probably similar to WoW in its grindiness wasn't appealing at all.
Tried other MMOs later when they became free to play, like Age of Conan, but never played those longer than a week before I realized they follow the same grindy pattern.
The concept of an RPG you play on massive servers with other players is cool, but in practice MMOs always devolve into boring, soul-draining grind.
.
