I will not play any MMORPG's anymore. I won't even play games that appear to have MMO-ish elements to them. I don't concern myself with if the game is good or not, I just know that my own life has shown me that at least for me, MMO's are a terrible thing and one of them in particular was incredibly addictive to me.
This seems a bit silly looking back at it now but there was a time when this was something truly inspirational and addictive and tons of people wanted to play it but only a certain amount of them could due to most of the world still using dial-up internet at that point in time.
I had played other MMO's, most namely Anarchy Online, which was my first real experience with MMORPG's. I was always kind of more of a fantasy player than a sci-fi fan, so when DAOC came out, I was super excited to get on board. I think it was $10 a month and the game was something like 30-50 dollars. I don't remember as it was a long time ago.
You ha to select a realm before even starting. There was nothing stopping you from having characters in all 3 realms but unless you had multiple accounts you couldn't be logged into all of them at the same time. I bet there was some people who took the game seriously enough that they put new accounts on each realm in order to spy on the other teams.
While it was still in the beginning stages of having technology capable of doing this, the Realm vs. Realm portions of the game were something totally new. In theory, there could be large wars taking place on the PvP maps that included things like siege weapons and the importance of maintaining control of each of the keeps.
It was extremely chaotic if the battles got too big though. Most of them consisted of a standoff between two large groups of opposing realms staying just beyond the range of the other side with no one being willing to move forward to engage. Eventually someone would buckle and the team that was closest to a respawn point would win over time. It was pretty obvious that was going to be the case but it was still very fun.
My addiction came from the fact that leveling up wasn't something you just got to do immediately like is so common with a lot of games these days. I would spend hours upon hours just farming an area for XP and it was extremely rare to see anyone that was max level. I don't even remember what the max level even was.
you also had to be very careful with how you selected your skills back then because while I am sure they changed it at some point, when you put your skills into one category that was it, there was no changing them.
because this was something that if you did wrong you basically nerfed your own toon, I ended up paying an additional $20 or so for an exhaustive guide book.
it's funny to me how I had little page tabs and highlighted sections of the book that were meticulous. Yet, I had multiple textbooks from my college courses that barely had been opened. My mind and devotion was definitely in the wrong place.
There would be multiple nights where I would get a good XP group and because this was so difficult to pull off and find at those times I would stay up way too late and for what? So we could pull the same monsters and get XP over and over and over and over again.
They probably changed this to make finding teams much easier later on but in the beginning days you had to stand at an area that someone told you was good for XP farming and wait for other people to turn up. Or you could just shout in one of the nearby cities with something like "LFG (looking for group)!" and then you would list your level and what not. Sometimes you would find a group, other times you woudln't. So when I got a good group on those late nights sometimes I would stay up all night and completely ignore the fact that I had school and a job to tend to as well.
My girlfriend,who was honestly one of the sweetest and most attractive people I have ever dated in my life, hated that I played this game. I would come up with excuses and lies about what I was doing that night and honestly, I think she would have rather heard that I was going to a crackhouse with some hookers than to hear that I was going to be gaming online at night.
I blew off EVERYTHING for this game and thinking back on it, it wasn't really even that good of a game. It was good enough and unique enough that it stuck around for many years but one day, I think I had broken up with that hot girlfriend or something, but I uninstalled the game and destroyed the physical copy of it as well.
I would later dabble in other MMO's but once they started to feel the same way, once I started feeling like i needed to blow off friends, family, school, or work or anything in the real world, I would stop playing whatever game that was.
Recently Destiny and Diablo snuck their way into my life by pretending to not be MMO's. Technically they aren't, but the have all the negative addictive attributes of an MMO.
I will not play any MMO ever again or even a game that is MMO-adjacent. I missed out on so many great things because of this and I regularly have dreams about the girl I blew off because I would have rather played a friggin' video game than hang out with her. It seems so stupid now, and this is why I am mostly a 1-player local RPG sort of person now.
I don't even play very many multiplayer games at all because I am aware of how obsessed I can become.
I'm sure there are many other people that have experienced this in their own life as well. I love video games, but I think that becoming addicted to them is a very real thing, and a very real destructive thing as well
