After playing World of Warcraft for 15 years, I started becoming increasingly bored and disgruntled with the game. The game being grindy and repetitive is no real surprise, I mean it’s an MMO. But the one thing that was really frustrating was paying monthly for a subscription and a huge chunk of cash for an expansion, but still having extra stuff flashed in my face all the time that was simply not possible to earn in-game. Mount skins, cosmetics, miscellaneous stuff that is only available in the Blizzard store. They also began adding loyalty items that require being subscribed every single month, and doing repetitive, extremely boring stuff on top of the other repetitive boring stuff, so basically double dipping on your grind, which really isn’t fun.
Aside from that, I also played other games that required a heavy amount of grinding too, and each one of them had similarly frustrating elements. Destiny 2, overwatch, Battlefield, Fortnite, Halo, and the list goes on. Each of them has the same issue: fear of missing out. FOMO basically makes it so that if you don’t seize the opportunity to spend real life money, you will never be able to obtain something really cool, because it’s only there for a short time, and then it’s gone, and you are made to feel guilty and bad about it. It’s just kind of depressing playing kind of games and realizing that you are now mentally dependent on financial transactions in order to get the full enjoyment of the game. That to me is a very very awful way to live life, and it really messes with your emotions
So I ditched every game that had any element of an in-game purchase. This is honestly helped my mental health a huge, huge amount. Now, I only play games that either have no microtransactions in them at all, or are completely free and 100% possible to play with no purchase required at all. So games like team fortress, deadlocked, Stardew Valley, and many other indie games that you can purchase and then never have to worry about getting suckered into the microtransaction cycle for
I’m glad I’ve had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.
First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you’d only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I’d probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they’d be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.
The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn’t serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don’t want to play the game at all, or b) you don’t get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.
And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I’ve acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn’t even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don’t worry about what it does or doesn’t say about their skills. It’s similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible… Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?
This should be the new gaming copy pasta. I applaud your rational introspection, and solid writing.
Comparing P2W to cheating is spot on, especially as these are much more heavily advertised and used in PvP games. What really annoys me is when these players, or similars that never go after equivalent players, feel all superior despite showing zero skill
On WoW, I remember playing a few times on instant 255 private servers, back in 2007-2010. It felt so damn pointless to me, especially as the raids still needed you to make a raid group. I enjoyed a portion of the grind, even as a mostly solo player.