MMORPG? MMMPPPHHH!!

Damn this is pretty fucking fascinating and I could reply to about half the posts in this topic....oh well I should have been paying more attention when it was posted =/

Brandon is right in some sense. But you have to remember that playing a MMORPG is also a form of socializing. Playing the game doesnÂ’t have to be purely virtual masturbation. You can make new friends, or play with your old friends, have a good time in the games social setting. I guess it depends on what your game-playing priorities are.

I had a similar revelation over a year ago. When you realize you've spent over 4000 hours playing Everquest you've got to do something about it. Quitting the genre was my solution.

I've stopped playing games entirely. I'm pretty happy with the results so far. I'm studying very hard now(for certs), and my focus on EVERYTHING else in life is so good. I don't know what it is, but ever since I got bored with Half-Life DM and CS, I don't really enjoy games the way I used to. I'm only 27, so I think once I feel satisfied with my career status for a while, I think I'll take up piano or something rather than get into games. Weird how this "just happens"...one day, you love games, and the next, you realize that you're ready to move on.

actually.. this is just like the crackshack

Hey guys, couple things to say.

First, I'm not blaming anything on MMRPGs. The blame is on my own faulty decision making process. It was a bad choice to play those games for so many weekends when I could have been doing something more beneficial (and just as enjoyable). The MMRPGs have elements that make them more addictive to me than other games. I also think that there are similarities in the things that I enjoy and that those similarities I observe might appeal to others as well.

Second, I do agree that this could be anything, not just MMRPGs. But my argument wasn't meant to be a general case. I was just speaking from my own experience and my own observations about why I got into them.

Finally, I think this is a personal decision. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there capable of managing a productive life and play EQ at the same time. In my case, I felt that I should just cancel my accounts. I really didn't want to continue wasting my time in that way. I wanted to entirely refocus my energies.

I still play games. Lately I've been playing Halo coop with Keith Schuler. But that's just going to take a couple days. And I'll learn from it. I learned from EQ and DAoC...but that excuse sort of falls flat after a month or so ;)

My first and foremost responsibility is to myself. Some of you have different priorities...your families, god, whatever. I am a strong individualist and this has been a self-realization that I was doing more harm than good. My core long term goals are to become a more skilled programmer and game designer. Playing EQ straight through a weekend doesn't help me reach my goals.

agreed. I bought RtCW yesterday and played the sp for about 2 hours, had a great time, and then stopped playing without that, "OMG, just 6 mores hours and I'll be able to use this staff that I've been carrying around for the last 3 weeks". Computer games should be fun, not the driving force behind your existence( unless you make games :)

Well jees guys, I wonder if DNF could've been done by now if you hadn't played those shitty games for so long?

Yeh GreenMarine do something else on the weekends that would be better for all of us...
WORK ON DUKE NUKEM FOREVER!!! FINISH IT! :)

j/k of course.. I know you guys need some breaks, I have already heard stories about 3DR that even tho it's taken a long time for DNF you guys still work your ass off and do a lot of overtime in the office just for the hell of it. Ultima Online made me lazy and fat.

Yes multiplayer RPGs, like any game, are a "waste of time." Of course, why this, in a nation (USA) of couch potatoes with adults watching, on average, more than seven hours of television daily should alarm us is beyond me. Lifetimes are being wasted on less interesting diversions; playing Bejewelled, reading and writing witless .plan files, waiting for Duke Nukem Forever, the list is endless...

Perhaps Mr. Reinhart, when you are done bashing on other games that happen to (actually ship and) be more compelling that anything 3DR has done (in-house) since DN3D (1996 folks!), you can take a break and return to your job.

here here. I'm parting out and selling my computer right now in fact for this very reason. I just sit here all night reading shit, playing shit, and it's time for me to stop. enough is enough, i've lost balance I think.

And on that note, the Shack DAOC guild webpage is at http://wwww.par1.net/daoc

Jump onto Palomides in the Hibernia realm and send me a /tell if you want in.

Haha, I could say the same for this website, just a massive time sink.

What's interesting is that this is no different from many other things in your life... an addiction to sports, an addiction to partying, an addiction to TV. It's just much easier to see it in something like DAOC, where your playing time is logged. If you take a step back and watch exactly where you are pouring all the time in your life you might be a bit disgusted.

You can spend a lot of time playing other games too, but I think MMORPGs are hated mostly because they're purposely designed to suck away your time. Very slow skill advancement curves, and harsh punishments for dying ( and dying is usually a result of a bad link or LAG 80-90% of the time ) are there specifically to make it take as long as possible to journey through the game and the developers make more money on their subscriptions. Couple that with, like in EverCrack, it can take you upwards of 30-45 minutes just to recover your items ( if your're lucky ), or walk to the next city, and it's insane to keep playing after the new 'wow' factor fades. How fun is it to sit and look in a spellbook for 20 minutes after each battle to regain your mana or whatever? And what do you get after you do spend months and months to reach that uber status? Nothing. A bunch of "items" and "skills" that are nothing more than variables in arrays passing through the electron stream of circuitry through your PC that would not take more than a minute to assign max values to all through a character or in-game editor used by the game admins.

Sorry, I'll stick to that other game called.. Life

But hey, if you're a loser, you're a loser... why not surround yourself with 3D models of chicks textured with thongs and g-strings... Can't be any worse a life than a guy who spends his days going out to bars, wastes even more money, and gets so wasted he doesn't even remember what he used his time for...

Whatever. Turn off the monitor. Go Outside. Talk to someone REAL (preferably of the opposite sex) and get on with things..

sounds like this was more of a love-letter to his boss. find time in your life for games, not time in your games for life. ahem.

I bought DAOC as my first MMORPG and I don't plan on paying for any of it now that my one month is up. I played with some friends who got really ahead of me once they started doing 10 hours a day. MMORPGs are all about the time you pour into them, there is so little skill involved. Any enthusiasm I've had for upcoming MMORPGs is more or less dead. These types of games are fun for the brief moments you get a level or a really cool item or something, the rest of the time is going back to the same spot to sit there hitting one button and watching your character hit some monster until it does and gives you XP. No skill or strategy are really involved. Ah well, just my rant. But I'm glad this guy sent the message out to other programmers who are jumping on the bandwagon.

With min specs like this EQ will be getting a much needed boost with Luclin...

http://www.cgonline.com/news/011126-03-n1.html

Here's a good anti-MMORPG campaign slogan idea:

Live one life: YOURS!!

Pretty much most human activity is masturbation of some kind. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Sometimes it's RPGs, sometimes it's FPS, sometimes it's the aquisition of art, or knowledge, or striking people off your hate list after you finally get around to slashing their car tires.

Each to their own, and have a merry Christmas. Maybe you'll find some virtual masturbation toys/games under the Christmas tree ;)

I want an MMORPG where I can be a tradesman or politician and still be able to progress.. and become somewhat famous on top of that. I dont find 'hunting' that fun. :(

Hmm.....

This is pretty much the reason I quit playing Counter-Strike. It was the same shit day after day, cheaters, whining bitches, and people taking it way too seriously. After playing for several hours at a time, I felt like I was wasting my life.

So I quit playing games altogether. I'm not sure why I still come here.

It must be Steve's super personality!

Since when has "masturbation" been a bad thing? It's an inexpensive and legal way to release stress.

These games are very popular. I doubt one .plan from a developer critizing it will change anything.

Your discussing it like its a crack addiction and people CANT kick it. Obviously people want to waste their time.

But this MMRPG stuff has been pure virtual masturbation. With no long term or respectful benefit that I can measure.

Uh, most all games are like this. What kind of benefit do you not get out of DAOC that you get in other games? Or anything for that matter? I mean shit, we as humans live for a while then we die. May as well have fun doing what you like doing.

I think the benefit of things is all in the eye of the beholder. I mean some people could say reading books have no real benefit because they are thinking in the hunter/gatherer sense. How does reading Shakespeare help me kill a boar and eat it?

It just depends on your values and your belief systems. But I take mild offense to this guy telling me or anyone else they shouldn't play a game like this because it may "waste your time". Hell, most people look at games as a waste of time anyway, and certainly would think this person's programming is a wasted ability...

Anyway I gotta stop rambling, it just got me thinking.

Well the consensus seems to be that Reinhart's complaint can be applied to any game, genre of game, or other recreational activity just as well as to MMORPG's (christ what an acronym). I'll have to agree.

But there is something about MMO___ games, an enhanced likelihood that they'll have that kind of effect on you. The only MMO game I ever played was Mankind, an MMORTS, and I tell you it CONSUMED me for a while. Then I realized, as Reinhart did, I suppose, that it was a waste of time. I think the fundamental difference (if there is one) between an MMO game and other games is that MMO games set you up to work and build toward a goal that doesn't exist. For comparison...
In a console-type RPG (Final Fantasy,etc), you can work up your characters and comb the beaches of the world for items and consume nearly as much time as you would playing an MMORPG (ever try getting ALL the chars in FF3 to level 90+?). But there is an end goal: beat the final boss. After you've done that, you still might wanna dick around and build up, but you KNOW that it's essentially pointless, that you're just doing it for some impressive numbers, blah blah blah. In a multiplayer FPS, you (can) play on and on and never "build" or "create" anything to show for it, but there are still limits. After ~25 minutes, when the map ends in CS, you've got some closure, and a good stopping point to make a context change. MMORPG's lack that stopping point, you have to arbitrarily pause in your adventuring, and the continuity disruption that results is often enough disincentive to simply prevent players from stopping until they fall asleep in front of their monitors. Yet though the "goal" doesn't exist in a MMORPG, the entire game system tricks you into playing as though there were. As if gaining one more level, or learnign one more skill, or whatever, is all that matters. Except when you get there, there's something else, nothing is final.
...which leads to...
I think the other difference might be in contained in the "massively" part. Even if you ascend the ladder of experience to dizzying heights, you're only one among SOOOO many, that attaining a sense of accomplishment is very difficult. In a story-driven single player game, when you "finish" the game, you feel like you've completed something. It may not be something worthwhile, but there it is. At the end of a map in an online FPS, you're shown the scoreboard, and there's your place. It may be first, or last, or somewhere in the middle, but there it is. Even games as open-ended as sports games have a "season" mode or somesuch, which you can "finish". MMORPG's lack this entirely, the game simply continues ad infinitum.

Kind of like life, don't you think? So long as you live, no accomplishment is ever final. In the game, it's so long as you keep playing. And that might be the key insight into why MMORPG's are such fierce time-wasters: playing a MMORPG is living a surrogate life. You have an entire other self, another life to live, and just as you never stop doing in your real life, you don't want to stop playing the game life. It's when the game life becomes more interesting than real life that people really get themselves in trouble.
Perhaps what MMORPG's need are finite (semi-randomized?) lifespans for characters? That way, just as life has a natural limit on your total amount of doings, so would the game life.


MoNsTeR

i'm just damned glad i kicked the diablo 2 habit. they came out with a patch that made it suck that much more - thank god - and i just upped and quit. after months of that, my skills at quake suffered, i had to play quite a bit to get em back...and what do i have to show for those few months, certainly not more gaming skills, like you would get from quake - but a bunch of accounts of items i spent months searching for (read:nothing...useless)

even was fucking with my relationship with my woman, damn, she was even addicted.

one computer
two people addicted to that shit...not pretty.
damn, i think some days we wouldnt even screw, we just traded off after 12 hours from playing to sleeping.

screw them kind of games

and shit, how bout this new one comin out from blizzard...like a warcraft rpg or somethin, the hardcore players will be required to play like 40 hours a week...damn

This is true for a lot of games, not just MMORPG. The Sims and Black & White come to mind.

and the shack

MMMPPPHHH?

Massively Multiplayer Mayhem Portrays Puny People Having Huge Hearts?

But this MMRPG stuff has been pure virtual masturbation. With no long term or respectful benefit that I can measure.

Kind of like posting here, right?

Yep.. I quit Diablo2 for the same reasons. I've been avoiding new MMORPGs like the plague for these same reasons, as well... The new Warcraft MMORPG might convince me, otherwise.

Most games I play, these days, are for the competition. There was some of that in D2, but not enough to keep me going. RTS's and FPS's are really the only genres that provide the kind of head to head competition I find worthwhile in games. I can get a healthy dose of mood-elevating competition from those kinds of games in a few short minutes. MMORPGs require hours upon hours of seemingly wasted time...

i've always wanted to try out an MMRPG but never got around to it. the last game i was really really really addicted to was Transport Tycoon. i spent hours and hours playing that... and it was fun !

I was into Asheron's Call pretty heavily when it first came out. I burned myself out after 6 months(thank god), and almost immediately thereafter I got into web development. I've spent quite a bit of time learning a lot of things. Most specifically PHP/SQL, which has been valuable time spent. I help someone create a website that is doing pretty well, and has allowed me to do some pretty creative things.

I don't even want to imagine what I would be doing if I kept playing. I never would have done any of that.

My brother(who still hasn't gotten out of it, after 2 years), got me back into it about a month ago, and I'm trying to keep it in moderation. I always do my work for my website before I play, etc. I think I'm going to have to rid myself of it completely though. Who knows what I'm missing in my life because of the time wasted playing this game so much? I'd like to know.

Hopefully, when playing a game you're having fun. If you're not having fun, then you should quit and do something else -- it's quite simple. MMRPGs are exactly the same, if you persist in playing despite it not being fun, then yes you're wasting time. If you're having fun, then that time spent has just as much value as any other game.

There's nothing wrong with the genre itself, people just have a horrid habit of spending time building their character without caring whether or not they're having a good time. They're the same people you see posting bitter and angry messages on eqvault, very similar to this .plan update, without realizing they're entirely in control of this. The game's not making you play it.

The genre as a whole would be much improved if people would get over that mentality.

thats exactly why i dont play mmorpgs, no skills, no thinking, just spend time on it and youll progress.