Theory for why we outgrow MMORPGs

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I think the real reason we outgrow MMOs is because we get bored, each new MMO usually has a small twist on the same old formula which quickens the boredom. Just like any game. It especially sucks for people who play WoW waiting for expansions with no content.

People also tend to simply not have the time to play MMOs as they get older. I know that I couldn't dedicate 7pm to 11pm 3-4 nights per week to raiding anymore.

[Nyoken]

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

[DarkAmbient]

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.

[Packing an i5]

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.

[Deleted]

Everything you just described is a single-player game. An MMO isn't a "massive world" it's "a lot of people" and when you have a lot of people then all that "mystery and discovery" almost immediately gives way to "look it up online, we don't have time to wait on you to get good scrub jesus christ stop being bad."

Yeah, that isnt what they used to be tho. But sure, if you go with that attitude then MMOs might as well stick to the grave because nothing they do will ever be good enough if everyone is going to look everything up online.

[SirRobin]

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.

[Post]

It isn't more complicated than playing the same game for extended periods of time causes boredom.

[sonicchill]

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..

[Deleted]

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.

[ro9ue]

For a lot of us here, we spent most of our childhoods playing mmorpgs. Be it Warcarft, Everquest, or Runescape, we played a lot of it. However, as we grew older, they stopped being a huge interest for us. As this has recently happened to me over the last year as I went through my junior year in college, I started to put thought into theories of why a game genre that used to literally be *the* only genre I played, now doesn't interest me really at all.

Then it hit me:

When we're kids, we aren't really making a living yet. Yeah we're having fun, but a lot of us lack a sense of purpose or get bored just sitting around after school watching tv when it wasn't nice out enough to play. I feel like this is what drew a lot of us into these games as kids: we took the role of a grown adult, and assumed their jobs, their duties, their lives, and we pretty much were given an avenue to live life as an adult with a purpose. It gave us a life of an adult as we were kids.

That's why my theory is that as we grow older and actually become adults, we feel no need to assume the roles of a fictional character that requires so much attention or maintenance, because we now ARE those adults that require attention and maintenance xD We have jobs we have to do, we have bills we have to pay.. we don't quite have dragons to slay but we can do that in a different game genre that doesn't require nearly as much of a time investment.

I dunno, just some thoughts I notice there are a lot of people my age suddenly completely uninterested in a genre they would spend hours a day playing with no break. This seems like a pretty logical explanation to me.

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.

[sonicchill]

At a certain point MMO becomes no different than a job where you pay rather than get paid.

[Karaoke]

Through use of reading comprehension one can conclude that the post is referencing those that find themselves in the same boat.

This goes to anyone who has this reaction to my post: if this clearly doesn't apply to you, then don't bother asking why it applies to you.

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.

[anaxie]

I think the real reason we outgrow MMOs is because we get bored, each new MMO usually has a small twist on the same old formula which quickens the boredom. Just like any game. It especially sucks for people who play WoW waiting for expansions with no content.

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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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.

We are exactly twins

[anaxie]

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.

Innovation? more like the genre is a watered down shadow of it's former self.

[Deleted]

Innovation? more like the genre is a watered down shadow of it's former self.

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.

[anaxie]

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.

[tss]

Players haven't outgrown (how insulting) MMOs, MMOs have outgrown their long-term playerbase in an attempt to reach a short-term wider market.

[anaxie]

Players haven't outgrown (how insulting) MMOs, MMOs have outgrown their long-term playerbase in an attempt to reach a short-term wider market.

Pretty much this.

[Hyve]

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.

[Gray_Matter]

I think the real reason we outgrow MMOs is because we get bored, each new MMO usually has a small twist on the same old formula which quickens the boredom. Just like any game. It especially sucks for people who play WoW waiting for expansions with no content.

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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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.

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?