World of Warcraft Degens Unite

[BryanM]

Ah, like with anything there's peaks and valleys.

Rich bastard Jessica blowing hundreds of dollars sparking Dark Angel Olivia the day of her release while 80% of the incidental characters he pulls come out as gold moons (the consolation prize for pulling a character you already have)... and she kind of weakly flip flops back and forth on her opinion of how much of a Whale she is... that is kind of funny. It's like jesus you rich bastard, wait half a year or something and let them build up the character roster a bit. Get less moons. Get moar dudes. Pay less dinero.

Some couple playing an MMO and letting their baby die, that's fucking horrible.

[kitten]

WoW's appeal always felt really transparently manipulative, to me. could never get into the play - which just felt like a rhythm of hotkeys - long enough for the social aspect or appeal of marginally better loot managed to sink its teeth in.

i did, however, spend about 2-3 years with warframe as one of the only games i was actively playing, and this was almost entirely without playing with other people i knew (i'd just join in missions with randos). i played the ps4 version, my friends played on pc - we talked about it, but couldn't play together. over this course of time, i spent over 1500 hours and probably 500 dollars on the game (average of around $15 and 45 hours a month? i frankly don't consider this too bad for how actively i was engaged by it over a long period of time). money spent on the game wasn't necessary and provided very little in-game benefit, but could net you really cool cosmetics, and a huge amount of the appeal in the game for me was dressing my weird space ninja bug cyborgs. i have an addiction to in-game dress-up, okay :[

i was a fan of one of the studio's previous third-person shooter, dark sector, and this acted almost as a spiritual sequel to that game with ridiculously expanded mechanics. there was a very high skill ceiling to adding style to your play, and i found it incredibly engaging to master each new character, outfit them with the best stuff, and then move onto the next or newest or consistently refine a favorite, and the roster was seeing constant updates with while new abilities and weapons. despite there being an occasionally massive grind-hump, i don't even regret most of my time spent with the game because of how slick the play was and how consistently you could push to get better or try new things.

i eventually quit when the amount of manipulation compounded into something that was forcing me to play when i didn't want to. daily challenges, weekly rotations of loot pools for the dailies or commitment required every day of the week for the bigger rewards, constant events, addition of "raids" that required vocal or fastly-typed coordination with multiple players - i eventually started playing the game primarily just to get the new stuff or stay active in these requirements, and i let that shamefully drag on for a few months before i pulled the plug on it, never to return. on top of everything mentioned, each new grind was worse than the last, and this all added up to strictly unappealing repetition. been 'clean' for probably more than a year and a half at this point (the game has since added an open world and fishing lol), my hobby much more healthily and happily maintained by playing classics at my own pace and on my own terms.

when i had started playing, i needed some kind of timesink to distract from how depressing my life was, at the time, and i feel like that's the root appeal. these are black holes for people who do not currently have either the energy or passion to pursue what they want, so they instead search for easy substitutes. in that way, it's much like any other habit or addiction - can be loosely helpful or recreational at first, but it eventually, inevitably starts slipping to something worse. warframe dulled the pain, but it ultimately wasn't adding anything to my life or perspective well before i quit. i imagine it's the same with any other game that begins to demand obscene amounts of your life, though i have trouble understanding how people are enjoying the play of something like WoW or pazudora so much as they are purely addicted to the numbers/loot tables/carrot dangling/social aspects.

to be honest, i feel most big, popular, modern stuff has deliberately started capitalizing on this design and that it has extended well beyond MMO's. even single-player games have become bloated with excess and manipulation, and likewise, competitive gaming has become rife with lootboxes, limited time cosmetics, etc. man, overwatch even has wish fulfillment comics based on fan reaction and movies - it's not game, it's a lifestyle, a religion. i feel somewhere along the line, gaming became less about fleeting, joyful amusement by a band of enthusiastic salarymen and more about cynical corporate dickery supplanting your entire life. i've since come to a pretty strong rejection of modern stuff, in general, though i do still indulge, from time to time.

[WelshMegalodon]

to be honest, i feel most big, popular, modern stuff has deliberately started capitalizing on this design and that it has extended well beyond MMO's. even single-player games have become bloated with excess and manipulation, and likewise, competitive gaming has become rife with lootboxes, limited time cosmetics, etc. man, overwatch even has wish fulfillment comics based on fan reaction and movies - it's not game, it's a lifestyle, a religion. i feel somewhere along the line, gaming became less about fleeting, joyful amusement by a band of enthusiastic salarymen and more about cynical corporate dickery supplanting your entire life. i've since come to a pretty strong rejection of modern stuff, in general, though i do still indulge, from time to time.

There's no feeling about it - you'd have to be blind not to notice the extent to which this has been going on in the last... I don't know, at least two console generations. Whether it has something to do with the rise of obnoxiously pervasive advertising via social media or what I don't know, but it's probably safe to say that we're all sick of "X as a manufactured identity that is being actively sold to you".

At the same time, it doesn't seem like anyone really cares about it or actually buys into it save for a very vocal minority (the same minority that pays attention to more than a handful of articles from sites like Kotaku and sends death threats to Sarkeezy whoever), which makes the level of noise that surrounded the Gamergate thingy all the more baffling.

Something something 'Corporate has always been hell-bent on taking anything even vaguely popular and making you sick of it. You just notice more these days because it happens more quickly and everyone's a lot louder about it, especially the 12- to 18-year-olds lapping it all up .'

Somewhat relevant thread from 4chan archive

By the way, if you become so addicted to your MMO that you want to keep playing after Corporate shuts it down, Corporate gives zero fucks because it doesn't make them money.