• tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

      Indeed.

      As someone who has in the past sunk a lot of time into MMOs from Ragnarok Online to FFXIV, respecting your time is the one single thing that MMOs as a genre are intrinsically prohibited from doing.

      MMOs are predicated on the notion of progression and levelling up and getting stronger, and to achieve that goal they must introduce hurdles and roadblocks to progression that can only be overcome through application of time.

      Level grinding, rare drops, equipment quests. All these things must be present, and must cumulatively take time measured in months and in years - otherwise the differentiation between weak and strong disappears, and so with it the ‘need’ to keep playing on which the game is predicated.

      Time-sinks are THE most fundamental genre-defining feature of MMOs.

      • KuroiKaze@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Thank you for explaining so succinctly why I have never played a single game in this genre. Jrpgs are about as close as I get.

      • MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        Aye, I learned this the hard way after about 30k hours in various MMOs (but mostly WoW).

        I’m 3 years clean now though!

        • tiramichu@sh.itjust.works
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          5 days ago

          Glad you escaped. These days I get my fix from Minecraft :)

          I can put time on projects that are involved and take a lot of effort, but the goals I set are all my own and purely creative, like “I want to design an inter-dimensional redstone teleporter device” or “I want to build a beautiful flower forest”

          It’s gaming time that is self-directed and on tasks that are more than just busy-work.

          And better still, it’s on a server that I self-host at home for me and a few friends - so it can’t be taken away.