KiNgBrAdLeY7: Not only MMOs need a terribly large investment of time and working-hours, but they are very competitive, too. A terrible idea for ANY adult, even those with loads of free time (for any reason). Most are infested by kids (the bad variety, i mean totally immature and ill-mannered). Others have snobbish, elitist players, who won't give you the time of the day, unless you are fully geared, max leveled, from a well known guild, highly ranked, etc. MMOs are usually NOT for the casual player, who simply wants to have fun. In Asia, they LIVE and earn INCOMES from excessive farming (in-game), power-leveling and selling of game stuff for real money (if and when it can be applied), or other services depending of the game and its features, or gameplay elements...
Due to friends of mine, in the past, i did the mistake of playing one or two, but ultimately i quit and took my life back, literally, lol. Old games revamped and good quality single player games, that thank all gods suddenly as of late started reappearing once again, after YEARS upon years of extinction, are reason enough for me to NEVER AGAIN touch anything massively online. Ever again...
P.S. Thank all gods that the MMO experiment ended badly for the gaming industry. Once upon a time, years ago, everyone was speculating and hypothesizing that ALL games, sooner or later, would become an MMO and the entire gaming field would massively "evolve" towards that course. Thank ALL GODS that ultimately, it didn't "work", or simply, didn't happen. Thank all gods.
You're right in everything you've written.
I too remember all too well the times in which the "Titans" of game development (Richard Garriott and others) claimed that always online would be the future.
I too believed it would be so. It was the age of
Ultima Online,
Meridian 59,
Asheron's Call and
Everquest. It seemed to good to be true. A true virtual fantasy world.
Alas... It really was too good to be true. Some time later I started playing UO.
What I discovered in online Britannia was a world filled with imbeciles, trolls and retarded people of all sorts and sizes. There were many wonderful people, sure. Unfortunately on a scale of 1/30 :P
Well, like most people I use games as a sort of escapism. I enter these virtual worlds of fantasy in order to forget about job, morons or certain problems. Soon I was starting to realise that I was living in a virtual world filled with boring jobs, morons and certain problems.
If you enter a place filled with humans, something bad or stupid is bound to happen, sooner or later.
In a certain way it reminds me of Malick's
The New World.
The europeans arrived at the Americas thinking they had found paradise. Some months later, it had all turned to hell.
And so ended my experience with MMOs
