How are people addicted to MMORPGs?

[Kruno]

I can't seem to get addicted to them no matter what. I played WoW for 2 weeks and I barely got through the first week before dropping it. I am trying to get back into Lost Ark and it just seems like work. I can get into Path of Exile fairly easily, but dear God MMORPGs just seem really boring.

is it just me?

 

[lukaszek]

is it just me?

when seeing such question there is only one valid answer: yes. Its only you

 

[JarlFrank]

I played WoW for 3 weeks back in 2006 and got tired of it when I realized how repetitive it is. It felt like having to work a job whenever I came home from school, going on the daily grind just to keep up with the other players. And at some point you just have to repeat the same content over and over again because you finished everything in the current zone but aren't high level enough to reliably survive the next zone... so grind grind grind it is.
Might as well apply to some boring office job, that offers just about the same level of excitement but with the bonus of paying you real money.

I tried other MMOs afterwards but never managed to stick with them more than a week. Boring genre.

I wager that most MMO addicts are repressed workaholics.

 

[Fedora Master]

Your addiction to shitposting supercedes any other.

 

[Humanophage]

You're playing them incorrectly. Don't do the repetitive questing and raiding. Focus on things which involve player interaction. Do various types of PvP, come up with ways to exploit the market, organise guilds, discuss political things on the chat. In the past when MMOs were more complex, there were also other things like non-instanced housing, so exploration was actually fun - though this was ruined by WoW and the like.

 

[Fedora Master]

Because modern MMOs are all about player interaction and totally don't try to wrangle everyone into being nice to each other.

 

[Comte]

I revisted wow in the fall last year for the first time in like a decade plus and that shit was so boring. I played for a few days and deleted it. I don't understand what I enjoyed about it so many years ago.

 

[samuraigaiden]

MMOs aren't really games, they are excuses for people to enact social - or should I say parasocial - behaviors that are dissociated from their real social life.

That's why some people who are not into games at all have been obsessed with creating a gameplay free MMO for as long as MMOs have existed. Second Life has more books written about it than actual users, for example. And the Facebook dude is trying the same idea again with his metaverse nonsense.

The successful MMOs are the ones which were not designed for people who actually like videogames. If you approach them as proper videogames, you will feel burned out very quickly because the game itself is purposely shallow. The real game is interacting with other players and participating in the "meta". Yes, see how it all comes back to the same thing?

TLDR: Stay away from MMOs, Mr. Kruno.

 

[Humanophage]

Because modern MMOs are all about player interaction and totally don't try to wrangle everyone into being nice to each other.

Depends on the particular game. There was a trend towards dramatic simplification with the rise of WoW, but it doesn't have to be this way. Simplification hit rock bottom around the early 2010s, but I wouldn't say it is getting worse. For example, I was thinking about Elder Scrolls Online in the above passage. Battlegrounds and Imperial City PvP is quite fun, you get lots of different situations and there is much room for build diversity. The market is relatively free and decentralized, so you can exploit it.

 

[Kruno]

It is funny that before Valve got rid of a lot of custom servers for CS:GO I would go on a specific server and I recognised the people on there, we all used voice, and we would shit talk for hours while playing it. It was fun. CS was the height of multiplayer gaming. I am struggling to find any kind of "fun" multiplayer games. Recently played Quake 1 MP which was fun. I have had hour long queues playing Quake Champions.

There is no more community in gaming like we had in the 90s.

 

[JarlFrank]

Regular match-based multiplayer games are much better experiences than MMOs.
Quake, Counter Strike, Age of Empires... you hop into a match, play against other people, exchange some banter while you play, and have fun throughout. The gameplay is fun and you are enjoying your hobby together.
Those recently popular co-op games are also ok, because co-op means you are likely to play with your friends, possibly on a private server where only people you know are playing.

But MMOs? You don't really interact with other people during gameplay, do you? The gameplay consists of mindless grind grind grind, even if you wanna go for big raiding parties you first have to grind yourself to the appropriate level which is a boring slog.
You don't do fun stuff with or against other people in MMOs. You perform boring menial busywork while talking to others as a way to make the process less dull.

Might as well just open a Discord channel and skip straight to the talking to people, without the boring "game" in the way.

 

[Falksi]

The Codex is essentially a giant MMO with better gameplay.

 

[Konjad]

In general I dislike MMORPGs. But there are exceptions, particularly: I got addicted to Haven & Hearth back in the day. Later we made the 'dex town, and after world reset the glorious Nowa Kodekzia, probably one of the largest towns in the game and a major power.

Fuck, I miss those days. I spent so much time in this lovely game with 'dexers.

Just look at this beauty of the known mapped world. Nowa Kodekzia (when we were still building it) at the very bottom in the center (Clockwork City being our close northern fort defending our tin mine):

Spoiler

 

[Curratum]

The only MMORPG I played was *drumroll* Ragnarok Online - a cute Jap mmo that I think I played for about 3-4 months back in 2003 with a friend from university. The only thing I remember from it is that the music was very very sweet and neat and it was decent silly fun with silly animations and you rode on giant birds that were totally not Chokobos because they had bigger beaks.

It was fun the first dozen or so hours, but then, like every game of the kind, got slower and slower and less rewarding and I just ditched it after a few guild battles. We were also playing on a local pirated server hosted in our town, so it was only like 100 people in the game overall, and only about 30-40 on at the same time, but we did have a few fun guild battles with the only other guild that existed and then I deleted it and never felt the urge to try another mmo ever again.

 

[throwaway69420]

I am about to finish the Endwalker expansion in FFXIV. I think when I finish the story, I will put down the game permanently. The endgame, that comes after the story, is the best part of the gameplay, but with the draconian ToS making the game a hugbox, and the classes completely homogenized at this point, other games will offer more engaging gameplay. I have put over 1500 hours into it, so I think it's time for new experiences. Most MMOs are the same. Since so many people are playing, the devs need to make progress tied to time invested instead of skill, so that everyone can "excel" eventually, but those that can play 24/7 remain dominant for their efforts. I think this is also why they are mostly number crunch sims, since increasing a number is much easier to map to time invested than skills like reaction time.

I think MMOs will never be "good" games, because the infrastructure for engaging massively multiplayer scenarios (realtime instead of pseudo turn-based) like a sword and board battle or a "real life sim" just isn't there due to things like latency. They will always have that aspect of "this is an unpaid job" to them. Don't get me started on dogshit full-loot MMOs where not only does it take forever to do anything like most MMOs, but you are constantly losing hours and hours of boring grinding progress due to other players. You never even get to pretend to have fun in games like those, you just grind, die, repeat. Indefensible, openly hostile game design.

 

[Rostere]

I can't seem to get addicted to them no matter what. I played WoW for 2 weeks and I barely got through the first week before dropping it. I am trying to get back into Lost Ark and it just seems like work. I can get into Path of Exile fairly easily, but dear God MMORPGs just seem really boring.

is it just me?

Yeah, never understood this either.

 

[Lemming42]

I liked RuneScape a lot back around 2005 - 2007. As far as I remember the appeal was:
- the sense of community. You'd meet a lot of bizarre people in the game, especially if you played during weekdays when all the normal, non-retarded people were at work. Making new friends from faraway countries was still a novelty to me back then.
- the sense of investing in a project, so to speak. Cutting down trees is boring, but it's less boring when you know that each tree is adding to your lifetime stats which you'll keep forever.
- the fun of being part of a game that's constantly updated and given refinements and new content. This is the norm today with patches and DLC and shit, but it was cool back then to have entire new areas and questlines suddenly added into the game.
- and, on top of all that, RuneScape had some pretty decent content in terms of quests and shit, so all this is held together by a game that's worth playing (although perhaps not worth playing for two years straight like I did).
- another point that RS has was that it could be played in any browser that supported java, meaning you could play it at work, school, in libraries, etc

The genre is kind of a relic these days, I think. It was a way to blend (early) social media and gaming, but there's no novelty in walking around as an avatar of yourself and meeting other people that way nowadays, since social media is so forced upon us that you'd get more interactions and meet more people by just opening any of the big tech sites. At best, the only advantage an MMO has now is that everyone's there to do the same thing (play the game), which means you've all got something to talk about, at least.

 

[luj1]

I get hooked to PvP moreso than PvE

played WoW for 10 days and had my trial not expired I would have probably continued. Other than that the only MMO i got into was Gw1

 

[rusty_shackleford]

me reading this thread


I'm pretty lucky there has barely been any good MMOs for years tbh, it's probably the biggest thing that keeps me from playing them.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

But MMOs? You don't really interact with other people during gameplay, do you? The gameplay consists of mindless grind grind grind

old school mmos ranged from difficult to brutal, the dopamine was in the final victory, not in the constant stream of +1s. i remember how on anarchy online we spent way too long trying to put together a team to go kill these gigantic living rocks who hit like a truckload of trucks and sometimes, just sometimes, dropped some sellable loot. when we were enough we took a look at the team composition, assigned roles, devised the most optimal buffs to cast on each one (in ao you could have only a fixed amount of "buff points" on yourself at a time), went to find a decent spot and hoped for the best if something was off (like, for example, having the equivalent of rogue be a tank through its sheer amount of dodge and/or any other possible class not performing in its primary role).
it was a huuuuuge waste of time, sure, but we were actually playing and thinking all along, and sometimes there were unpleasant but exhilarating surprises.
then we got warcraft which managed to trivialize each and every aspect of mmos, roles were fixed, teams were automated, people were teleported, all was left was 1 2 3 4 5 6.
of course, catering to the endless amount of retards out there, it sold like hotcake, but the genre was ruined forever.

 

[J1M]

Genre caters to a lot of player types, but now that discord has replaced individual games as the social hub, MMOs primarily serve people who need to feel a sense of progression because the progression in their real life is stagnant.

 

[Myobi]

How are people addicted to eating dirt? I've tried eating 2 spoons full and honestly I just wanted to die.

is it just me?

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

People got addicted to MMOs back in the day when they were magical, way back when everything wasn't documented on a wiki. Exploring a vast, virtual world that took a long time to level up and progress through had people hooked. Nowadays the only thing that really keeps people playing MMOs super hardcore is if they are apart of a social group.

I do know some people that just log into WoW to do dailies for an hour and raise their ilevel, and they don't raid or socialize, so I guess maybe people are addicted to the dopamine rush of seeing numbers go up.

 

[Caim]

MMOs were better back in the day because they were new and wonderous places in which to play and interact, and the developers weren't trying to nickle and dime you at every turn.

Nowadays it's all about efficiency, only smelling the roses because the associated achievement you get from smelling all 850 rose patches in the game will give you a title with a bonus of inceasing all healing by natural sources by 1% (which is good because Druid healers are the meta now) and the developers trying to wring more money out of you by wasting your time and selling you the solution, and when you disagree with this the shills come out of the woodwork to call your mom a hoe.

 

[Doktor Best]

It is funny that before Valve got rid of a lot of custom servers for CS:GO I would go on a specific server and I recognised the people on there, we all used voice, and we would shit talk for hours while playing it. It was fun. CS was the height of multiplayer gaming. I am struggling to find any kind of "fun" multiplayer games. Recently played Quake 1 MP which was fun. I have had hour long queues playing Quake Champions.

There is no more community in gaming like we had in the 90s.

Get a vr headset and play Pavlov. Its practically cs from back in the day just in vr. It has custom servers with small communities.

There are also other game modes with one particular fun one where 1-2 people play predator like aliens and have to hunt down a squad

 

[Dr1f7]

Idk mmos have been in a really bad state for the last 10 or so years. Not sure how people get addicted to them but people get addicted to all sorts of stuff so..

Maybe they're just so used to one thing and don't want to take the energy to try something else, and mmos provide endless grind

WoW is not a good game but it's still the best MMO out there, and they seem to be headed in a general "good" direction since legion, so even though it sucks now I think they have potential to turn it into a good game over the next few years