Yesterday I touched on quitting live service and MMOs for a month to see how my gaming habits change. I spend much of my gaming time keeping up with daily/weekly/monthly tasks for digital items in MMOs I don’t often use, leaving no time for everything else in the gaming world. These cosmetic items – mounts, transmog, and toys, are for collections I don’t own. I need to break out of the “must collect everything” thinking regarding these games because the collection is one business decision from going away forever.
But, how do I accept the games I have always played are no longer right for me?
Not The Target Audience
Of course, I received an invite to the cozy MMO Palia on the day I decided to step away from MMOs. I played the closed beta for about twenty minutes and realized I would never be the target audience for this game. I knew right away I would never be able to keep up with the gameplay loop and the hunt for more items. I have grown out of this type of persistent online multiplayer experience.
This is ok. The sooner I accept this, the better my gaming life will be.
I am hanging on to a vision of how I played MMOs 10-15 years ago. These games have changed, my ability to devote time has changed, and the experience I want is no longer what these games provide me. I am caught up in the sunk-cost fallacy. Cold turkey may be the way to go.
Blogging and single-player gaming experiences are my future.
(And Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to have to wait until I go through some of the backlog to be cleared before Starfield)
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Man, I feel you. There was a period when I told myself I was better off without MMOs but I slunk my way back in. I am, at the very least, only playing WoW for raids and dungeons at the moment and not going too far out of my way for collectables (though I do my best to fill out the Trading Post, currently), and FFXIV I’m still focused on the main story, for the most part. But I do see myself spending more time trying to keep up and doing certain tasks in order to collect stuff, and I enjoy the collecting but my gaming backlog gets larger and larger, and that’s only one hobby. There’s also so many books I wanna read, movies to watch, writing I wanna do, so many things!