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> I quit EVE after it became "legal" to buy subscription passes and sell them for in-game currency. I was a very active world of Warcraft player up until wrat

by y4mi 7y ago

> I quit EVE after it became "legal" to buy subscription passes and sell them for in-game currency. I was a very active world of Warcraft player up until wrath of the lich King. At the time I was leveling my alts blacksmithing by traveling around the world and mining minerals just to increase some arbitrary numbers on my skills and professions panel. Then I thought to myself: I keep hearing about people using bots for that: let's try this! So I set it up... After it ran for a few hours I came back with a full inventory of minerals and for the first time in my life realized what I've been doing for the last years... Exactly nothing. I deleted the game a few weeks later, couldn't find the energy in myself to keep raiding. I sometimes get back to it for a month or three. But it just cannot keep me interested any longer. I think there are a lot of reasons to actually lose the touch with MMO games and suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving anything... For you, it might've been the game time tokens, but I'm sure you would've realized it in some other way if they didn't do that. I actually think that these tokens help players that just want to play a little without wasting their entire lives away quite a bit. For example the last time I played world of Warcraft I did some mythic+ runs... I just bought a token and could buy all the required consumables for the whole three month I played. I wouldn't have had the patience to get these the normal way and as such would never have been able to experienced any higher dungeons.

chii 7y ago
> suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving anything then you've missed the whole point of an MMO game - you're meant to make meaningful human connections, and find online friends who may even outlast the game. EVE is one of those games that almost require such friend-making for it to be fun (playing PvE in EVE is boring, unlike WOW).
- wincy 7y ago
  I was in a top wow guild. Paid to move my character to a new server, even. Was in a number 1 guild, I remember getting thousands of messages when we got a server first. It was insane. It felt so amazing though in that moment. I imagine I’d feel the same if I’d won the Olympics as silly as that sounds. Ultimately it was a hollow victory. The hundreds of hours, the 185 days of real 24 hour days I put into that single character, I can never get back. Those people were had a thin facade of friendship, but I don’t talk to them anymore. We were never really friends. We were just addicts engaging in the same quest for ever larger dopamine hits. I remember kicking out people from our guild because they “underperformed”, even if they were good guys and we liked hanging out with them. All that mattered was the raid. All that mattered was winning. It’s weird too because I think back and at a deep level our server first was the most intense positive emotional experience of my life. Not my kid being born, not getting married. My mind was convinced we were in a war against an insurmountable foe and we won. It makes me sad, like my level of what’s exciting is permanently messed up and skewed from what reality can offer. I’ve heard similar stories about meth and other drugs, that colors don’t seem as bright after you stop. I really wish I’d never played WoW, or EVE. It was escapism for some really terrible times in my life and rather than help it just retarded the healing and mental recuperation I needed for many years. It definitely wasn’t about friendship, though.
  - Ntrails 7y ago
    Never got server firsts, but wasn't far behind. Certainly I remember grinding mats and gold for raids. However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn't make any sense. Is it meaningless to tend a garden because there are gardeners? I could pay someone to cook my food, does that make cooking pointless? You traded your time for experiences and afterwards decided you made a bad decision. That is your right - but I don't regret the entertainment that Eve or Wow have given me. You created a weird equivalence which I don't think holds.
    - wincy 7y ago
      I think you’re confusing me in your first paragraph for another person, sorry. I never used a bot. I’m glad you enjoy your time on WoW and EVE. I was just trying to describe my personal loved experience and contemplation of what I gained (or lost) from it many years later. I was extremely depressed and suffered terrible anxiety after a traumatic experience. I think if socializing had necessitated getting out of my house, or getting a job rather than living in wow and further secluding myself from the world, I would have recovered sooner. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe things would have been worse without that escape. To be clear, I’m not making value judgments about other people’s enjoyment of an entertainment product. I’m simply describing in retrospect how I feel about wow and EVE after totally immersing myself in those worlds for years.
    - y4mi 7y ago
      > However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn't make any sense. The bot was my example of how a game lost its magic for me. I was trying to convey that the tokens which disillusioned the previous commenter aren't actually so bad. It's just that if you stop thinking about these rules as necessary and realize that they're just arbitrary decisions with no actual impact beyond this game and you're currently investing a significant amount of time into them.... Then you're very likely become disillusioned with the game and suddenly everything you do in the game is suddenly tainted by that admission. the triggers vary widely while the actual reasons for the triggers are generally this disillusionment I'm also not saying that gaming is a lesser hobby. I play games quite frequently, but never again with that previous zeal. It just became an activity to kill time with. Before, it was more.
- VLM 7y ago
  The problem with that is if you optimize the design of the game to focus on the social and pare away content not applicable to social, the game rapidly flows thru a farmville like state on the way to simply being facebook-tindr-with-a-joystick. Meanwhile the players who wanted experiences and sandboxes and escapism are horribly disappointed. Instagram with an outerspace background theme? No thanks.
Noumenon72 7y ago
There are a lot of games like that -- I wrote a permutation program that pretty much solved Alphabears, whereupon it wasn't fun any more. Now I just make sure not to look up any tips or hints for games, because discovering them for myself is the fun I'm looking to have.
- Causality1 7y ago
  The first few hours where the world feels infinite and the rules are vague is always the most memorable part of a game, to be sure.

by y4mi 7y ago

chii 7y ago

> suddenly you realized that the time spent isn't actually achieving anything then you've missed the whole point of an MMO game - you're meant to make meaningful human connections, and find online friends who may even outlast the game. EVE is one of those games that almost require such friend-making for it to be fun (playing PvE in EVE is boring, unlike WOW).

wincy 7y ago
I was in a top wow guild. Paid to move my character to a new server, even. Was in a number 1 guild, I remember getting thousands of messages when we got a server first. It was insane. It felt so amazing though in that moment. I imagine I’d feel the same if I’d won the Olympics as silly as that sounds. Ultimately it was a hollow victory. The hundreds of hours, the 185 days of real 24 hour days I put into that single character, I can never get back. Those people were had a thin facade of friendship, but I don’t talk to them anymore. We were never really friends. We were just addicts engaging in the same quest for ever larger dopamine hits. I remember kicking out people from our guild because they “underperformed”, even if they were good guys and we liked hanging out with them. All that mattered was the raid. All that mattered was winning. It’s weird too because I think back and at a deep level our server first was the most intense positive emotional experience of my life. Not my kid being born, not getting married. My mind was convinced we were in a war against an insurmountable foe and we won. It makes me sad, like my level of what’s exciting is permanently messed up and skewed from what reality can offer. I’ve heard similar stories about meth and other drugs, that colors don’t seem as bright after you stop. I really wish I’d never played WoW, or EVE. It was escapism for some really terrible times in my life and rather than help it just retarded the healing and mental recuperation I needed for many years. It definitely wasn’t about friendship, though.
- Ntrails 7y ago
  Never got server firsts, but wasn't far behind. Certainly I remember grinding mats and gold for raids. However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn't make any sense. Is it meaningless to tend a garden because there are gardeners? I could pay someone to cook my food, does that make cooking pointless? You traded your time for experiences and afterwards decided you made a bad decision. That is your right - but I don't regret the entertainment that Eve or Wow have given me. You created a weird equivalence which I don't think holds.
  - wincy 7y ago
    I think you’re confusing me in your first paragraph for another person, sorry. I never used a bot. I’m glad you enjoy your time on WoW and EVE. I was just trying to describe my personal loved experience and contemplation of what I gained (or lost) from it many years later. I was extremely depressed and suffered terrible anxiety after a traumatic experience. I think if socializing had necessitated getting out of my house, or getting a job rather than living in wow and further secluding myself from the world, I would have recovered sooner. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe things would have been worse without that escape. To be clear, I’m not making value judgments about other people’s enjoyment of an entertainment product. I’m simply describing in retrospect how I feel about wow and EVE after totally immersing myself in those worlds for years.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    > However. To suggest that a bot renders gameplay meaningless doesn't make any sense. The bot was my example of how a game lost its magic for me. I was trying to convey that the tokens which disillusioned the previous commenter aren't actually so bad. It's just that if you stop thinking about these rules as necessary and realize that they're just arbitrary decisions with no actual impact beyond this game and you're currently investing a significant amount of time into them.... Then you're very likely become disillusioned with the game and suddenly everything you do in the game is suddenly tainted by that admission. the triggers vary widely while the actual reasons for the triggers are generally this disillusionment I'm also not saying that gaming is a lesser hobby. I play games quite frequently, but never again with that previous zeal. It just became an activity to kill time with. Before, it was more.
VLM 7y ago
The problem with that is if you optimize the design of the game to focus on the social and pare away content not applicable to social, the game rapidly flows thru a farmville like state on the way to simply being facebook-tindr-with-a-joystick. Meanwhile the players who wanted experiences and sandboxes and escapism are horribly disappointed. Instagram with an outerspace background theme? No thanks.

Noumenon72 7y ago

There are a lot of games like that -- I wrote a permutation program that pretty much solved Alphabears, whereupon it wasn't fun any more. Now I just make sure not to look up any tips or hints for games, because discovering them for myself is the fun I'm looking to have.

Causality1 7y ago
The first few hours where the world feels infinite and the rules are vague is always the most memorable part of a game, to be sure.