For me it was Terraria, Satisfactory, Tetris Effect Master Mode, Minecraft with Mekanism mod & CSGO / CS2 (almost 2000 hours in CS alone).
Edit: There are so many answers that I might only reply if I have something interesting to say. I will read all of your answers though. 🙂
Edit 2: It has become too much for me and I have to disable notifications. Thank you for the massive response and please continue to discuss with everyone here. ❤️ 🫡
Original World of Warcraft.
I put years into that game. Then I started a family and I just had to quit.
If my gf (now wife) played we’d probably never get anything done.
I played for maybe 4 years… With my GF.
We’d play together for hours nearly every day.
I would play “a bit” before work and end up an hour late. This happened often and we just quit cold turkey. Ended up MMO hopping for like 12 years. Now we don’t do MMOs.
Ha, I met my now-wife on WoW so long ago :D.
I guess I consider myself lucky I never really got addicted to that point, as in, I never even maxed a single character. (I had a bunch of them in various race/class/faction/server combos though…later found out I had ADHD lmao)
I mostly treated WoW like a chatroom with a game attached hahaha.
I totally understand the draw though, like, I LOVE MMOs as a concept but I hate how difficult it is to make an ethical one that doesn’t waste players’ precious time, or incentivize addiction. I feel like there’s an answer buried in how some MUDs operate(d), somehow… before casino psychology was introduced.
Reconciling the desire to pop into a “meta-verse” (screw you, facebook, that’s our word.) to socialize and cooperate with others, against our finite time constraints on various scales, is a difficult challenge.
I could ramble on and on, but linear level systems definitely exacerbate this. I never played as much as my always-online friends so we’d all start characters and suddenly by next week they’re all level 30 and I’m still like 13 and I’m like “K nvm.”
But it’s a very human thing to enjoy a sense of progression. Hm…
I’m glad you were able to break free though! We’re similar in our gaming lives. Instead of one monolithic game, we pass the controller on single player games or play co-op stuff, and get a wide variety of experiences. :)
That’s sweet you found a partner through an MMO.
Our issue is MMO drama. You always end up in a guild because all MMOs push guild/group content. Most guilds have leaders and leaders are just human. People are of course flawed. We all have our quirks and that creates friction. The friction brings drama.
You need organizers to coordinate and lead activities. A good leader will organize parties and help with strategy.
In every single game I end up in a leadership position because I’m really good at it. Which brings more drama to me directly.
That and it does suck to run a raid and finally drop the piece you want only for it to go to someone else…
FF14 has that token system which is nice though.