I have to admit it. I have a dangerous gaming addiction that if not firmly handled causes me to neglect a lot of aspects in my life.
I have always used videogames as a form of escapism and justify it by saying I am trying to destress from a long day working from home on a job that no longer gives joy.
Yet it came to a point that I was so preoccupied with playing that it started to affect my work life as well.
It all started with downloading Ragnarok X: Next Generation from the Google Play Store.
Part of it was boredom since it was still a lockdown period for us here in my country and I was working from home, part of it was nostalgia as I played the original Ragnarok Online when I was a kid when it was in all its pixelated 2D glory.
I initially created an archer class character because I always played as an archer/hunter as my first character.
Two days in and it was fine because like everyone else everything was new as it may share the basic lore and background but the gameplay, items, and effects were so different. Well, it was the next generation after all.
One particular aspect that changed was having life skills. Your character could now fish, mine, craft, gather herbs, and cook as needed.
In order to advance in some of the upgrades for your weapons and armors you needed certain herbs and while it particularly grew at certain intervals the bad thing was it was only available on one server. So with hundreds of people trying to gather the same herbs even if there were 6 different spots it just was so hard and not to mention time-consuming. It was too much for me at this point and I decided to delete the character and the app. Tragedy averted!
After a month of the servers running, with friends still encouraging me to play again, I installed it again, and feeling wanting to be different made a Merchant/Blacksmith character this time.
Usually created as a crafter or a fast melee attacker it would be different from the usual long-range character that I am used to.
Reading guides and watching videos made me learn more about how to overcome some of the challenges I had in my first playthrough.
I joined a guild as it was fun to talk to people while playing as well as some parts of the game you could only take on with some people at a party. My character at this point was not strong enough to solo most things and being melee had its disadvantages as it relatively harder to kite monsters.
So I made a second account which was an acolyte/priest support character. This made grinding easier as I could heal and buff my blacksmith making it more cost-effective in not needing to use HP pots as well as kill faster because of the buffs.
Eventually content for PVPs and Guild vs Guilds began appearing and from a PVE guild we transformed into a competitive guild and I had to make a choice to either use the blacksmith or the priest. Ultimately since support characters are hard to come by since everyone wanted to be a damage dealer I made the choice to gear up the priest.
I still made use of the blacksmith but more for PVE content and supporting the priest character with crafting and money.
It was fun being a support character but in the same time it was stressful because in PVP the focus was to kill off the priest as soon as it starts in order to remove resurrection and heals. So the name of the game was to make a tanky support priest that could endure enough punishment while resurrecting dead allies and providing much-needed heals and buffs.
I had a fixed team that I worked my build and playstyle to compliment the characters they had.
We were in the top 15 server-wide, rising to as high as top 10 but usually in the top 11 or 12 spot. Majority of those in the top 10 were whalers guild (whalers are those players that really paid real-life money to buy items and cards)
I have no hate on whalers because they support the game and make it possible for a lot of free-to-play accounts. While I am not exactly free to play as I do contribute in small way but not in the realms of hundreds of thousands like some of them. Some have even paid more than a million for items!
To further augment the ever-growing in-game need for money, materials and items of my competitive support priest I made a third character, a mage/wizard because by far it was the most efficient farmer with its AOE skills and cheaper to equip to be effective.
This was when it started to take so much time that we were always joking that Ragnarok X (ROX for short) was a full time job.
I would typically end my working day at around 6 AM in the morning since I was working to support the US market. This was in time with the server refresh of the day of all the daily tasks which would consist of 10 quests that would either ask you to kill a certain number of specific monsters, gather, mine o bring certain items to an NPC. This would usually take about 15-30 minutes depending on the type of quests.
Having 3 characters meant that it would usually take me about an hour to finish it for all of them and I would usually multi-task and have all three doing it. When they were almost the same levels they had similar quests so it was faster at this point.
After the daily quests, it would be time to pick specific spots for them to AFK grind. I would leave them be for about an hour or two to finish using their odin's blessing which you got from the daily quests in order for you to get stamina in order to do life skill tasks like fishing, mining, gathering, cooking or crafting.
I would usually have my breakfast at this point or brunch if I took to long to grind out while waiting for them to burn through the stamina. Then I would do the upgrades that they need, go through items that needed to be replenish and depending on the day prepare for the events.
Every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday we had the PVP based 5 vs 5 KVM battles where your guild gets points for their ranking and you get tokens for you to upgrade certain skills and character bonuses. This was an one-hour and 30 minutes event that had you pitted with other players.
This was often stressful for me because as the priest support I would usually get 2-3 people just start hitting me with all their skills to kill me off as soon as possible. I would usually have a wizard to help defend me with either debuffs or AOE skills that would kill off the more squishy attackers like assassins. The rest of my team would also try to kill off the enemy priest as soon as they can and it was often a race on which priest survives the longest while being able to resurrect, heal and buff while trying to stay alive.
On Saturdays there would be a Guild Vs Guild event where the objective was to capture castles which would provide them mining rights of certain stones used in upgrades. This was 45 minutes as we would either defend if we had a castle or attack to steal one.
This can become so crazy as there would be multiple guilds that would be trying to get castles not to mention the whaler guilds wanting to make sure to be able to monopolize the castles. Alliances, back-stabbing and even hints of being paid off makes these exciting.
We would often be in discord having a battle leader issue commands on what points to defend, where to head to and if we are to focus fire and try to get a castle. It was really fun and I would admit one of the reasons why I could not quit as every week we just wanted to prove ourselves.
Then there was the monthly server events that can provide equipment, cards, costumes and even the crystals used to buy in-game items. So even free to play players had a chance if they were diligent enough.
Having so many things to do and even if I would just mostly concentrate on the priest and sometimes with the blacksmith character it was turning into a time sink that I was losing sleep, had times that the events would coincide with my working hours and while I could work faster and was output based it started having an effect as I was not concentrating in work.
The final straw was when I was removed from a certain client because I was not able to deliver. I kept telling myself that I could handle it and would dial down on playing.
That was what I said but I still continued on playing recklessly and started to pay more in order to grow stronger. So not only was it a time sink but also getting more expensive in my quest to remain competitive and strong.
My wake-up call was when I hardly slept that day because of a day packed full of events and activities that I slept through my workday and did not submit anything. I got paid for a day of not working and my work ethic finally kicked in and said enough.
I bid goodbye to my guild and said I have to face real life.
So with any type of addiction, I went cold turkey. I used to smoke and when I decided to quit I just stopped one day. I still have it installed on my phone and computer but have not used it for over two months now.
I left all forums and discord that talked about the game. I unfollowed people that I watched their streams and guides and have not looked back.
It is just scary when I get so addicted to videogames that I would lose myself to it. I thought that I could handle it better but my self-control is not that strong as it seems.
So my tale is one of caution and that playing videogames is good but in moderation and when it does not stop you from living a life.