I stopped playing MMO's a few years ago because while I have had a lot of fun playing them I kind of feel as though they are a bit dangerous and counter-productive to normal human life. I regret getting involved in them in the first place and while I have tried others there are 3 big ones that stick out in my mind that truly consumed my life.
I realize that this is all my own fault and I am not at all trying to blame the people that made these games. I didn't HAVE to play them the same way that I never had to play any game that I picked up. It all has to do with the individual. However, I know many people that have dumped years and countless hours into an MMO only to one day walk away from it forever and then reflect on how it is rather ridiculous that amount of time they spent on a game that never ends. That is the entire design behind these games... you never achieve victory.
The first MMO I recall ever playing was Anarchy Online. It was one of the first MMO's to achieve widespread release but this was NOT one of the games that ruined my social and academic life because it was so buggy and unstable that the incentive to play the game simply wasn't there. The servers were down so frequently that there was no real reason to keep playing the game.
This all changed with a game that was released a few years later at which time the global internet infrastructure had also improved dramatically as well. The honor for the first MMORPG that negatively impacted my life goes to this gem that was released in 2001.
Dark Age of Camelot
This was back in a time where you went to a store and purchased a game in a box that came with disks, maps, and instruction booklets - what a time to be alive. You installed it and the game worked right out of the box. I suppose that there was some level of patching that took place but I never noticed it. You could play in one of 3 realms: Albion, Hibernia, and Midgard. Albion was kind of the human world, Hibernia was more elf-like, and Midgard was more of a dwarf type realm.
There was nothing stopping you from having characters in each of the realms but unless you were some sort of lunatic that loved this game enough to have multiple licenses you couldn't play in more than one at a time.
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the map that came packaged in the game
I chose Hibernia because of some sort of fascination with elves and that is where I spent most of my time. Since it took extremely long to level up there wasn't much incentive to have toons on multiple realms and I say this as someone that probably dedicated 6 hours a day or more to playing this game.
The mechanics were actually extremely simple compared to today's games but for the most part it followed the "holy trinity" of team RPG's in that you had tanks, healers, and DPS-oriented characters. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages and my favorite was playing as a healer or DPS caster of some sort. There were other support roles such as bards but in the time that I spent playing this game I never really understood these hybrid characters since they were never really sought after in groups due to their inability to do anything exceptionally well.
You had the ability to form massive guilds and promote people to certain levels within them and for a while it was a lot of fun although many a night that I spent sitting in the same place over and over killing the same respawning enemies for XP I would eventually go to sleep wondering "WTF are you doing this for?" The excitement of going up a level was really a big deal and when I say it took a really long time to level up I mean this was just a crazy amount of time. While I don't remember exactly how long it took I can recall that there would be times that I would stay up all night with a solid group that was raking in pretty decent XP per hour with good efficiency and only go up 1.5 levels in 8 hours.
Most of the content was PVE (player vs enemy) but there was a massive world where it was a free-for-all where there were high-level NPC monsters and also the very real possibility of running into characters from other realms that could also attack you. I realize that this is extremely common in basically all MMO's these days but we were kind of in the MMO infancy back when this was released.
I look back on that time with a sense of disappointment in myself because I was so addicted to this game that I blew off my friends, family, and my girlfriend, who I eventually lost because of this game. I blew off parties, social events. classes at university as well as my own graduation ceremony in order to play DAOC. At the time I didn't really care because I thought I loved this game more than anything else. I was also eating garbage food and drinking a ton of coffee and energy drinks and started to gain weight.
Work, school, relationships, romance... all of these things became distractions from the online world that I wanted to be in more than anything else.
I like to think that I have grown up a bit since then but it is with a great sense of disappointment that I look back on those years, which to many people have the opportunity to be the best years of their lives (when they are in college) and I have a tremendous amount of regret. I blew off people and obligations for what? The quest for a higher level so that once I achieve that higher level I now have to start the entire process over again?
Looking back I can't believe that my girlfriend stuck with me for as long as she did. She was a real winner too. She was way out of my league as far as looks are concerned but I simply threw her away and actually didn't even care when it happened.
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There were dungeons with final objectives but people rarely bothered with them and instead just "camped" a certain part of said dungeon and waited for the "pop" which was an indication that the enemies had respawned and it was time for us to pull them, one by one and get the xp, the same we had already done many dozens of times before.
I never met any of the people i "knew" in game at any point in real life but my relationships with them somehow became more important to me than the actual people that were around me in my real life. When I finally deleted the game it was because I had a proper job now once I got out of college and unlike classes in a university, you can't just not go to work and not expect to be reprimanded for it.
By the time I finally walked away from DAOC for good, I had nothing to show for it and I am not trying to say that people shouldn't play video games or even MMO's for that matter. I just feel as though there is a certain level of idiocy that I achieved by getting so addicted to a game that there was literally nothing that I wasn't willing to forego just so I could sit alone at my desk for hours on end doing the same thing over and over again.
It all seems so crazy to me now many years later, but it wouldn't be the last time that I would fall victim to the MMO trap and after DAOC I swore I'd never let it happen again. It did happen again though. I'll talk later about the second time I allowed this to happen to me and how it once again destroyed my relationships and even my work-life.