Yea it's called stress. You grow up and you have to pretend to be e and do a million other things society tells you to do. To be an adult. To be someone you're not. Now if you don't do all of these things, you're gonna get looked down upon. Or you simply just played too much of one game, and you never knew or learned how to take the edge off. Making that stress go away! That's an art right there, the ability to learn how to fucking relax....majority of the people on this planet completely lacks this.
That being said, I my self have been hardcore raiding in vanilla(wow) nonstop every expansion up until now. I'm still loving it. And yes, I work 200+ hours every month so I am doing more than just raiding.
My advice; learn how to relax properly, to make the stress go away.
Life gets so much better then :P
I think some people are being unnecessarily harsh to the OP
I was 35 when I played an MMO for the first time. Now I'm in my 40s I still play but the magic has definitely gone. Now I see most MMOs as just a different paint job on the Skinner box.
Just how the cards fell stagnation in the market. MMO is the riskiest type of game a company can choose to develop. When MMos were new they soared in popularity now there are all kinds of these online games that are not mmos technically you can play online without playing an mmo and alot of people do not like the grind and type of gameplay associated with an mmo.
The problem is the MMO titan has always been and still is Wow and theres been no direct competition with wow from other games they always had to abandon a monthly payment model and have decreased their developer team size and are played by very few people compared to wow. Wow has a strong brand name and is a very polished game but it has stagnated and it has taken bad ideas from other games not borrowed enough good ideas from other games.
Frankly I think it boils down to The story is repetitive and has been awful since wotlk was over. The quests for the most part are still very repetitive and do not feel rewarding and in their attempt to make new kinds of quests they have these really tedious ones now that I would prefer not to do. I also hate phasing.
They killed community interaction with Lfg and Raid finder however those things were asked for and seen as a solution to people not being able to find people and guilds to play with I think they should of just started server mergers a long time ago.
The only mmorpg that really kept me interested was early wow. It had the right mix of sandbox and theme park for me. As wow changed that mix more I lost more interest. I tried hard with other mmorpgs, like aoc/war/wso/tor, but never found the particular mix that early wow had. At this point I'm just not that interested in mmorpg's anymore.
Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.
For whatever the reason I definitely did outgrow MMO. I began playing TSW only because it plays a lot like single player with social element to it. Before that I didn't touch another MMO for about a decade, and I don't plan on playing another one anytime soon..
As people have said before me, it's nothing to do with age, it's simply because there is very little innovation in the genre.
This is an interesting theory, but I think I've had a different experience.
MMORPGs were often an escape for me. No matter what the bullshit was I had to deal with in real life, I could run away to this fantasy land called EverQuest and just explore and collect and let the game exploit my psychological structure to hit me with some dopamine. I do agree with you though that it's giving us something we don't have in our real lives, which is for most of us, power.
Casting a fireball, summoning a skeletal minion, and swinging a massive sword of fire are things I can't do in real life. In fact, sometimes if a game immersed me enough, I could get lost in that and often look forward to that virtual reality more than real life.
In high school I had some fun with friends, but there while my friends often got excited about going out with their fake licenses (murica) to get beer, I was more interested in leveling up my Iksar Necromancer to explore the rest of Kurn's Tower.
What changed for me was really only the willingness to devote time and my stress tolerance during my free time. Spending 4hrs a night to grind through a level or spending all night raiding to wipe on the same boss... that just doesn't feel worthy of my time anymore. Honestly, most MMOs I play now that I'm nearing 30, I enjoy casually exploring all of the zones and will maybe do the story content once and the dungeons a few times and I'm done with it. Raiding is out of the question. Doing bleeding edge challenging content just isn't in the cards anymore.
At a certain point MMO becomes no different than a job where you pay rather than get paid.
First off, this ^
OT, I hadn't really considered your point before, but I can definitely see where you're coming from. For me, the responsibilities of adult life shifted my priorities (maybe motivations is a more accurate term?). Instead of getting high level or a crap ton of gold in game, I realized I could do that in real life instead and have more freedom/satisfaction from doing it.
Really good insight.
I outgrew WoW because it turned into an everyone gets everything souless grindfest and a shadow of it's former self. That and the huge backlog I developed over the last 10 years and the thought of needing to log in to play a game going completely away was enough to push me away from the genre most likely permanently after a decade.
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We are exactly twins
That's just the market changing. I'm assuming you mean in terms of MMOs been pretty much accessible to everyone, which is where the money is. I was talking about actual innovation. We had a mass installment of combat oriented MMOs over the past 5 years, and they were interesting, but now they are as stale as hotkey mmos. Need that new idea to just take off the genre again, if it happens or not is another question.
No I'm talking about WoW abandoning how the game was pre WoD in favor of removing gear customization for mass RNG. For streamlining raids so everyone gets a size thats juuuuust right. For opting into no lockouts because everyone loves a grind. For tacking on Garrisons and Garrisons 2.0 because a grind in your grind is fun. Oh joyous joy.
The game shit the bed since 4.3 and I opted out of the genre.
Players haven't outgrown (how insulting) MMOs, MMOs have outgrown their long-term playerbase in an attempt to reach a short-term wider market.
Too many MMORPG's are now just MMOAG (Massively Multiplayer Online Action Games), and they've lost a lot of the RPG element. There are some older RPG elements which needed to go, such as (in my opinion) Resistance. It was a rather dull annoyance to have to make sure you had the right resistances to be able to play, but there are many other elements that I feel have been lost in the MMO genre.
Quality of Life & Balancing is a key part of gaming, and the RPG genre is often very unforgiving to both those factors.
This is exactly what it is. People see something new and get interested in it. The problem is that they consume content faster than the companies can create it so they get bored. It's one of the reasons why Minecraft is successful. There is a lot of player created content so it's less likely for people to get bored. Even a company like Blizzard that has reams of content from their history doesn't have enough to keep people occupied.
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It's not so simple. People have limited time. There is a lot of competing things out there - life, other games, television, etc. People don't have time for the immersion that used to be there so they want smaller bites of immersion. I don't think the companies have managed to adjust to that. How do you hook someone into the game so they become enthralled but still give them a way to stop playing after an hour and come back the next day for some more?