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Did anyone else stop playing MMOs because real life is basically the same thing?

I'm new be nice

I'm new be nice

Member
I'll admit it, when I played World of Warcraft for the first time in 2004 it basically became my "replacement" for daily life. Everything else in my life felt like this thing I was doing to "sustain" my time in World of Warcraft. Obviously I was pretty young, i'm sure it's a common sentiment with a lot of youths, and I honestly don't regret the time I spent playing it. It was a blast! And now i've moved on.

But the game, like drugs can sometimes do too, changed some of the ways I view the world. Raiding was the first time I felt like I was involved in something akin to a "professional" environment, handing guilds my resume, learning to work within a group of people, and fulfilling my role to the best of my abilities. A lot of motions I built up within the game seemed to follow me into my profession today.

The strongest sentiment however is that feeling of "grinding", making progress towards a goal. The feeling carries strongest in my music, rather than running off to raid, avoiding social gatherings to raid, or trying to get some time off from work to raid, I want to focus that time and energy into being the best musician I can be, and it all feels exactly the same to me as trying to build up some new set of armour or what-have-you.

Now whenever I look at some new and upcoming MMO I just think to myself, "what's the point? I'm already in one right now!". Real life has all the familiar trappings, only with atomic resolution and some sensual feelings.

I'm curious if everyone feels the same way, or if you just look at MMOs less as a replacement for life and more as just another game or activity to enjoy.
 
No, because sometimes it's nice to escape to a fantasy world. Unless you can cast Shadow Bolts on demons in real life, I'll never give up MMOs.
 
I broke MMOs after I grew to hate them. I only got sucked in because I never had a ps3 for years, and when I finally got it it's grip weakened and other types of games have come in to give me a better bid for my time. Also it was at times a life devourer, now I have more time and more varied things to do, it's liberating.
 
You may enjoy watching Sword Art Online OP!

I never got pulled that far in to MMOs. I think it had a lot to do with a former roommate being locked in his room for days playing WoW. Dude would stink and eat like crap. I saw him once ignore his real-life girlfriend to go questing with his guild for a few hours.....crazy.
 
when I played aion, it consume my life and destroyed my social life. It took so much of my time, having to kill all those world bosses (6), doing instances (5), doing sieges. Having to wake up at 4 am to kill a world boss and spending 8 hours pvping over a world boss. The happiest day of my life was when my guild fell apart, it was the happiest day of my life in years only second to getting my degree.

The saddest thing about playing an MMORPG is the realization that the amount of time you spent on it doing the exact same shit, you could have been done so much more in real life.

Recently, after hitting 2000 hours in guild wars 2, I became realize I was doing the same thing I had promised myself I wouldn't do. So now I just play extremely casually once every 2 weeks for 2 hours.

To answer your question OP. NO, I didn't quit mmo because it felt like real life. I reduced my time to 2 hours every 2 weeks because there is progress in life, there is no progress in an MMO.
 
MMO is nothing like RL, not even the repetitive grind of dailies. I'm not sure people who say that have even experienced what RL has to "offer".

The MMO universe doesn't randomly shit its bed on the economy (except EVE and UO?), outsource my raiding slot to some India dude at 1/3 the cost, or give me a raid leader I can't say "no" to without living the month on baked beans.
 
silvermember said:
To answer your question OP. NO, I didn't quit mmo because it felt like real life. I reduced my time to 2 hours every 2 weeks because there is progress in life, there is no progress in an MMO.
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I mean, that's pretty subjective right? Life is this abstract thing, there's no god telling you "you must become a pipe fitter!". You decided (or at least determinism decided) what "progress" is, which is probably why I think the way I do.
 
Renekton said:
MMO is nothing like RL, not even the repetitive grind of dailies. I'm not sure people who say that have even experienced what RL has to "offer".
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I'm not saying it's EXACTLY like it or anything, i'm just saying there are stronger similarities (as I outlined in my OP) compared to other forms of escapism.
 
eventually I moved to the east coast, and then all those 10pm to 2am scheduled raids were 1am to 5pm, and I needed to sleep to be able to do my job properly. Not being able to play with my real life group of friends kind of killed the whole thing for me. Now that I've been out here for 5 years or so, if all of my local friends got into some MMO I probably would play with them, but we're all grownups with other responsibilities so I don't think I would play as much as I used to when I was in college.
 
I'm new be nice said:
I mean, that's pretty subjective right? Life is this abstract thing, there's no god telling you "you must become a pipe fitter!". You decided (or at least determinism decided) what "progress" is, which is probably why I think the way I do.
Click to expand...

Not really, if you let a game get in the way of what is most important then it stops being subjective. An extreme example was henry cavil apparently almost gave up a role of a lifetime just because he wanted to raid in WOW.

Whether we choose to accept it or not, the comes a time where life progress stops being subjective and becomes an issue and that time is when it begins to interfere with real life issues. When you let a game dictate your actions it stops being subjective. You can argue it's your life, but that will only be fooling yourself and making excuses.

One of the things I have heard a lot from MMORPG player and one of the reasons why WOW is still number 1 is because a significant percentage of players do not want to lose their progress. They have "WORKED" on their characters for a long long time and they cannot simply work away from it, because that will be admitting that all that time spent raiding wasn't really worth it at the end.
 
I stopped MMOs when I moved time zones and couldn't play with my real life friends anymore. Also quit XBL...no fun not being able to play with friends after work and they're all sleeping.
 
I stopped personally because everything I was playing I had already played for hundreds of hours before in EQ and WoW. That, and because I decided to spend my time on art.

...and Dota 2.

and because I'd rather spend time on a wider variety of games. When I played EQ/WoW I played far less. This could be good or bad depending on your goals and what you're looking for.
 
I stopped playing WoW because there were too many headaches when it came to organising raids and it didn't feel like it was worth the time and effort anymore (end of WotLK), didn't like the direction Cataclysm was going too. Also playing against the US latency was another hoop to jump through which made being a high end guild frustrating at times.

In hindsight, yeah it was a massive waste of time. But I still have friends that I met through the game and some good memories.
 
I stopped playing, because I simply didn't have time to keep up. That and after watching all my money go into a single game I realized that it was time to quit.
 
lol i feel you.

wasted my sophomore of high school on this one mmo. it did trap me into grinding hundreds of hours, doing dungeons, leveling ..i quit when i hit level 163 q.q max is 180 btw. and getting worried about some stupid guild i was in. I stopped when my pc started to have problems running the game lol. but for a whole year..this..mmo was my life.
 
EhoaVash said:
lol i feel you.

wasted my sophomore of high school on this one mmo. it did trap me into grinding hundreds of hours, doing dungeons, leveling ..i quit when i hit level 163 q.q max is 180 btw. and getting worried about some stupid guild i was in. I stopped when my pc started to have problems running the game lol. but for a whole year..this..mmo was my life.
Click to expand...

wat MMO
 
I'm new be nice said:
I'm not saying it's EXACTLY like it or anything, i'm just saying there are stronger similarities (as I outlined in my OP) compared to other forms of escapism.
Click to expand...
Did anyone else stop playing MMOs because real life is basically the same thing?
Click to expand...
It's just escapism with a grind, very little like RL. Else, you would be similarly hooked to improving your career right from the beginning. RL career repetition lacks many of the hooks and feedback loops to keep you coming back for more. Furthermore it lacks the sense of progression that is very explicitly shown in MMOs, unless you're in the minority. You have to invent your own motivations.
(edit)
 
Everytime I play an MMO, I can't help but think how it'll all be for naught once the servers go down permanently =[. Really ruins it for me even if it is fun. I also then start to think that I could be clearing my backlog...
 
Two things got to me.

1. Paying for a monthly sub caused me to focus only on that game and ignore any new purchases I made/my backlog because if I wasn't playing an MMO all the time I wasn't getting my 8-12 dollars worth.

2. The only thing I really liked doing in most MMOs was getting various classes up to the level cap and maybe outfitting them in low end raiding gear and selling shit from various professions. Then an xpac would come out with a new race/class and I'd get further behind in my goal.

Both of those remind me of real world situations in a way, so I am in with this thread.
 
silvermember said:
Not really, if you let a game get in the way of what is most important then it stops being subjective. An extreme example was henry cavil apparently almost gave up a role of a lifetime just because he wanted to raid in WOW.

Whether we choose to accept it or not, the comes a time where life progress stops being subjective and becomes an issue and that time is when it begins to interfere with real life issues. When you let a game dictate your actions it stops being subjective. You can argue it's your life, but that will only be fooling yourself and making excuses.

One of the things I have heard a lot from MMORPG player and one of the reasons why WOW is still number 1 is because a significant percentage of players do not want to lose their progress. They have "WORKED" on their characters for a long long time and they cannot simply work away from it, because that will be admitting that all that time spent raiding wasn't really worth it at the end.
Click to expand...

I'm just talking about it in the general sense of social interaction and general reward based activites, not literal bodily functions. As I said in the OP: "Everything else in my life felt like this thing I was doing to "sustain" my time in World of Warcraft."

Renekton said:
It's just escapism with a grind, very little like RL. Else, you would be similarly hooked to improving your career right from the beginning. RL career repetition lacks many of the hooks and feedback loops to keep you coming back for more. Furthermore it lacks the sense of progression that is very explicitly shown in MMOs, unless you're in the minority. You have to invent your own motivations.
(edit)
Click to expand...
There are several clear indications of progression in real life. Finishing a mortgage, buying a new car, getting that big promotion. But regardless you still invent your motivations in MMOs. Many people simply log in to socialize and roleplay. Some choose to only do PvE or whatever

HeeHo said:
Everytime I play an MMO, I can't help but think how it'll all be for naught once the servers go down permanently =[. Really ruins it for me even if it is fun. I also then start to think that I could be clearing my backlog...
Click to expand...

Everytime I create a piece I think about how the universe will one day face the Big Rip or the Big Crunch or the several other various endings to everything as we know it... Uh... sorry if that ruins your fun for life. But hey at least mistakes aren't permanent!
 
Since when is Scarlet Blade like real life??

scarlet_blade_1.jpg
 
Yeah, I too stopped because I realized I could slay dragons and orcs in real life just as well as I could in World of Warcraft.
Damn these dragons. Always flying over my town and breathing fire and shit. Stupid things.

I stopped playing because I didn't care anymore
 
Leveled up to level 30, then it just stopped being fun when you started needing other people, trading, farming etc. Just said F that and never came back.
 
Bjoern the Smexy said:
Yeah, I too stopped because I realized I could slay dragons and orcs in real life just as well as I could in World of Warcraft.
Damn these dragons. Always flying over my town and breathing fire and shit. Stupid things.

I stopped playing because I didn't care anymore
Click to expand...

Well you have to exercise a little imagination here
 
Absolutely, yes. I played WoW for 2 years during vanilla. Once I got into raiding content, the game started to feel like I had a responsibility to my guildies and so the game was more like a second life than it was a game that I enjoyed playing.

Once the guild sort of fell apart, it was sort of like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. Ever since, I've avoided WoW and any other MMO so that I don't fall into the same trap.
 
Crazy as it might sound the opposite happened to me. I stopped playing MMOs because they have all turned into basically the same. Level 1~50 (whatever the cap) is a giant tutorial you breeze through and the "real" game involves grinding the same identical dungeons for weeks to gear up for the next set of identical dungeons. All the while you never speak to anyone, nobody has any reason to interact with you and it all could have basically been a single player game up until the party scenarios.

Why do any of these theme park mmos bother even having a world? Nobody gives a shit. Why have levels in general? Nobody bothers to gear up until end-game anyways. Somebody should really tackle that idea. MMO built exclusively around raids. Just cut out all the filler.
 
DarkoMaledictus said:
Leveled up to level 30, then it just stopped being fun when you started needing other people, trading, farming etc. Just said F that and never came back.
Click to expand...

The parts you listed that made it stop being fun is totally what made it fun for me.

I'm not the "kill 15 zombies" sort of guy.
 
Boy, if WoW was like real life it would be scary. Imagine being in a car getting a yummy breakfast burrito and your buddy who came with you grabs it from your mouth and starts eating it in front of your face and then casts portal and leaves you stranded with just a check. Haha, joking aside no. WoW is an escape from my life, and I still play it because of the guild I'm in but it certainly isn't my life.
 
Never understood the appeal of mmos. I played guild wars for a while, but that's the last time I put in a considerate amount of time in an online game. I find them boring. Strangely enough though, I never tire of Monster hunter. I love that shit even though it's grindy as fuck.
 
I stopped playing MMO's because the one I was playing was interfering with my life. I remember playing during the weekends 18 hours straight. Friday to Sunday for a period of 2 years. I would go out of the house just to buy fast food. Sometimes I wouldnt sleep during those weekends and be sleep deprived during the week.
I also played 5 hours daily during the week. I would go into withdrawal If I missed a day. It caused me to fight with my family if they wanted to go somewhere with me.

Thinking back I was lucky that I always liked to run daily and play sports during that period of my life and that my grades didn't suffer in college. At least my physical appearance didn't suffer from the bad habit. Mentally I was a wreck though.I remember getting depressed for weeks when I realized how I was losing my time, and how I couldn't stop. Got to a point where people in the game were as important as real life friends, and I would even get into fights ingame for them. I also spent close to $1k in the game. I think that was the breaking point for me. Luckily all that happened when I was between 18 to 20 years old.
So fuck no, is nothing like real life. It is more like being an addict, finding ways to rationalize the behavior.
 
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