I’m just curious on what makes you leave? Content? jerks? Bad Mechanics?
Time commitment. I realized to play how I wanted to and get full enjoyment I needed to spend considerably more time than I wanted to/could commit. I used to be able to log in a couple times a week and play for a few hours and have fun. Now that I caught the min/maxing bug, I am not satisfied just doing my old thing. So I bailed.
I probably could become hooked again if there was a new MMORPG that broke new ground, but I had seen enough in WoW that I was OK with giving it up…for now.
Time commitment and wanting to go out. It was when I went to college, actually. I had to spend more time studying and then slipped into socializing with classmates. Games like counter strike were easier to play because you can play a map, put it down and walk away. I found with MMORPGs I’d say to myself, “I can wait to get a little more XP before I log off. Maybe I’ll ding!”
I quit Guild Wars mostly because I was done. I got to the point of the game where I was basically spending exponentially larger numbers of hours trying to get what amounted to the trendiest new clothes, realized the utter futility of the pursuit, and decided to do something…well, not more productive, but at least more progress-oriented with my time.
That same objection to grind and style and paying every month for the opportunity to work for kewl geer like some kind of bizarro Hot Topic employee is what stops me from starting pretty much every other MMO, so I guess I quit Guild Wars when it started being an MMO.
Pretty much the same as Brian Seller. I got to the point where I could see all the content that didn’t require exponentially large increases in time commitment.
Also, there are other games to play. I wanna see other games and playing an MMO sort of precludes that if you don’t have the time.
1.) I can’t play enough to keep up with friends.
2.) I’m completely turned off by discussions involving DPS and aggro and all that. (Dots! More dots!)
3.) After I’ve explored the areas I can get to, I get bored by the never-changing world.
Really, I’d prefer a good co-op RPG experience with some friends, rather than anything MMOs currently have to offer. I always wanted to be able to dial up my friends when playing an Ultima, and have each of us be a party member, going through the single-player game together. NWN tried to do this, and maybe it succeeded on some level, but I never found it.
Most MMOs I’ve play, I play solo and they are too shallow.
I stopped playing EverQuest mainly because our guild had dwindled down to so few members that it was hard to have a decent number of us just online at the same time, let alone able to field a group. If I was going to have to reestablish an entirely new social circle, it seemed like I may as well do so in a newer, fresh game.
Of course that just begs the question of why the guild declined in the first place, and that has a lot to do with EQ’s high-end raiding structure. Ours was a ‘family’-style guild, based on knowing each other well from previous groupings and a rather casual, low-commitment structure. That meant that we got along well, but weren’t really prepared for the kinds of commitments that high-end raiding needed, which often depended on being able to drop whatever you were doing at a moment’s notice and getting organized rapidly. A lot of the guild wasn’t really interested in that kind of play (often due to RL issues, as most of the members were adults), so the guild couldn’t be mobilized en masse and couldn’t compete with the other raiding guilds.
But there were some in the guild who did want to raid, and it would have been frustrating for them to remain in a guild that wasn’t capable of it, so they left to join the big raiding guilds. Recruitment helped replenish the numbers, but a lot of them saw us as a stepping stone towards the big guilds, so it often felt like a revolving door where people would join up, hang around for a few months, and then move on. Recruitment eventually dried up as there weren’t a lot of new EQ players anymore and people started going directly to the big guilds, and the core membership dwindled as more people got bored and got curious about doing raiding or trying other games instead. WoW was probably the real deathblow to the remaining handful of members.
I quit Asheron’s Call just because I wasn’t finding the time for it anymore. I originally started playing it just as a diversion during stretches where I got bored or frustrated with EQ, so I never really had much invested in it and never really bothered to get to know anyone, and there was a point where I realized that I hadn’t played it in months and didn’t really feel any compulsion to, so I may as well close my account.
WoW I’ve quit and rejoined several times now, quitting mainly when I get bored (first time was when I hit level 60 pre-BC and ran out of interesting things to do; second time was in the middle of BC when I hit Nagrand and just got tired of all the go-kill-X-whatevers quests), or because I’ve struggled to fit in with the playerbase as well as I did in EQ (warriors seem to attract tons of dumbasses and their “U TANK ZQ NOW PLZ?” requests, making it hard to find good groups and new friends, and the third time I quit was when a plan to level up with a group of RL friends fell apart after they rapidly outleveled me). But curiosity about some of the better quests and new zones and expansions and all that then eventually drags me back in…
That.
And the balance between the “I want to have a life” and “I need to play this for hours and hours to actually get the most of it” is really tricky. Life won.
I quit playing MajorMUD because it was on a local BBS and I had just left high school to attend college out of state. So I switched to QuakeWorld CTF instead.
In most instances where I quit, and that includes several MMO’s going back to Everquest, it’s due to one of two reasons:
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All my friends have left.
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Something in my life is requiring a time commitment that does not mesh well with playing an MMO at the time.
The other times I’ve “quit” are just temporary, either rage-quit at something stupid, or boredom quit because I’m waiting on something fresh to be added to the game. I always end up coming back in those instances.
I haven’t. 4 years and I’ve only gotten as far as promising myself that I’ll never play another. As others have said, it’s the time commitment that’s hard. Fortunately or unfortunately, so is saying good-bye to folks whose company you enjoy.
I quit a while back because it all felt the same. The grind just got to me - along with the feeling that my actions were of no consequence to the world left me feeling kind of “meh.”
If you’re really looking for a reason to move on but can’t:
Don’t let the good get in the way of the great. Company you enjoy in real life is even better! :)
I’ve tried two or three, WoW was the longest at 4 months or so. I just can’t see past the spreadsheet; once I start seeing the same critter over and over and over but with a different number/color in his name, I lose all sense of enjoyment. City of Heroes was probably the most enjoyable to me, but it was overcrowded and the travel restrictions beat me up for too long. I just can’t grind my way to the good content quickly enough, nor do I have the time to devote to a guild/group.
H.
Asheron’s Call was the first MMO I tried.
Just reading about UO turned me very much off. Who needs spawn camping and PKing? How is this roleplaying? My perspective was that of an experienced tabletop and MUSH RPer. UO just seemed so mired in mechanical crap that broke immersion. It was a throwback to old MUDs and D&D compared to what one could do with modern rule systems or MUSHes. It seemed to attract, reward and celebrate, en masse, the kind of powergamers one tries to avoid in RL roleplaying. I can say that being an aspiring powergamer myself these days - at least in certain MMOs.
I don’t think I appreciated some of the clever elements in the design, the sandbox approach I’d later enjoy in SWG, because the ugly technical bits of the metagame, including power inflation, and the twinkish attitude that instilled in most players, so completely turned me off. Almost all MMOs still kinda bother me on that level.
Asheron’s Call promised that players could affect a storyline. That lured me in. However, I couldn’t find many good roleplayers there at all and the actual gameplay was so boring and repetitive. Why? Well, because it was an MMO and to date the best they can do is disguise how boring and repetitive the PvE gameplay is (with the possible exception of a few MMOs that have given the player base storytelling or GMing tools to make more of the game themselves). Conversely PvP seems to attract, by and large, extremely poor attitudes and very bad behavior.
Anyhow, once I got to the point that I could see how this game worked and how little there really was there for me I dropped it. No immersion here.
I dropped WoW and Conan and Pirates of The Burning Sea for one or both of the above reasons.
Only SWG and Eve Online have kept me around.
SWG offers pretty good storytelling tools for the players and gives them a great deal of control in how they define their surroundings and their characters. Over time, at least on my server, a very strong roleplaying community has emerged and learned how to get along (most of the time). There’s immersion in all these characters and PAs and cities and stories and events even if it’s an immersion in something that’s not precisely Star Wars.
Eve Online, on the other hand, has the power of direct immersion. The game systems reflect the world and so the players act like part of it because that’s what they’re rewarded for. Immersion is absolute. You can’t not roleplay to a certain extent. All your options fit into the context of how things work. This is unlike any other MMO out there. Roleplaying isn’t “talking in funny accents” (though some of us may be guilty of that at times), it’s playing the part of a character who is of the milieu. That includes how a player spends his time online and the message that sends to other players. Players also control a portion of the big picture in Eve Online. Really exciting stuff in terms of wars, politics and intrigue goes down. They don’t even really need a backstory or news events. Just write up what the players are doing.
Sure, PvP still attracts major assholes but the universe is so big that it’s easy just not to get stuck in a situation you don’t like. If you chose to bid up, get involved in wars or major economic efforts or piracy, then you take risks. If you fail you can, usually, safely recover at your own pace without being hassled. Still, since everyone’s on the same server all those events can indirectly affect you and make things seem alive. The potential is always there for you, yourself, to become a legend in the game’s history not merely a footnote on one of 100 separate servers.
I’ve wondered for awhile, if we would ever reach a point of MMO burnout. It happens in every other form of entertainment. Boy bands, teen pop stars, space opera movies, etc…
Games, however, seem mostly immune to burnout. Apart from genres mutating into, or being absorbed by, other genres, (The 2d-platformer + the point-and-click adventure = 3d adventure/platformers, for example.), gamers seem to be happy to just keep on playing the same basic games over and over. As long as the themes are changed every now and again, we’re happy.
Still, you have to wonder with MMOs if there will come a point when the majority of the millions and millions of players just burn out. Maybe it won’t ever happen, as long as the expansion packs keep coming and there’s at least one or two new MMOs to try every year, but since there’s really so very little to any given MMO, I just don’t see how it can last forever. You’re basically playing the same game, with minor interface changes and moderate gameplay variations, whether you’re playing EQ2 or WoW or LotRO, etc…
Given how many people just get tired of the game when they’re maxed out a few characters and seen everything there is to see, will they burn out then? Will a whole lot of people burn out around the same time, given how quickly the MMO genre has grown?
I want to think it will. I want to believe that burnout will lead to mass cancellations which will strip away the appeal that creating a cookie-cutter WoW clone has to a few MBAs with investment capital. I want the genre to move forward, and that’s only going to happen when the current business model no longer works.
Of course, I don’t really believe it will happen at all. I think the process of releasing an expansion pack every xx months works just fine in attracting enough people back who previously burned out, and having most of them linger around until the next expansion pack rolls around. I don’t see all that many people just giving up the genre or their favorite game en masse. I’d love to be wrong, but decades and decades of seeing the same sitcom with different characters on tv tells me that people are perfectly happy to keep eating their same entertainment diet, regurgitate it, then eat it again.
My wife and I played Dark Age of Camelot from launch until Nov 2004 (or whatever month is was that WoW opened the gates). So, four years? I think DAoC launched in Oct 2001, and we played it almost every day. We made friendships that we maintain; people who have come to visit from Texas and New York and who we still interact with. We loved that game, seriously. Only people who were there in Midgard on the Percical server can know what it was like. We had several enormous guild alliances that all worked; there was actual realm pride; people respected each other. I’m not talking about a few guilds of a dozen people; there were hundreds spread across dozens of guilds. And the arseholes were so few that everyone knew their names (Adode!). It was quite something.
By the time WoW launched we were dying to leave. I would guess that final 12 months we were logging in purely because of the community. And the reason is called Trials of Atlantis. It used to be that once you had hit 50, all you need do was get a spellcrafted suit of armour, get a masterpiece, player-crafted, weapon and then go RVR (PVP) your face off. The tutorial was done and then you could just play. Trials of Atlantis added loot. Ugly, stat enhancing, overpowering, hard to get, loot. And not only did you need to go do quests to get it but once you’d gotten your pants of awesomeness you had to go level them up, often by killing the same thing over and over. I can’t remember what it was that my friend Thorgenson was leveling, a helm, maybe, but he sat out there by himself for weeks killing harpies, one at a time, over and over again, to make the helm as useful as it could be. What a mess.
So, we left. And WoW was new and different and boy did it fix a bunch of the problems that other MMOs had: a mailbox, yay! A auction system that works, yay! Mounts! Shapechanging! No XP loss from dying! No grinding a camp of mobs over and over! It all felt so fresh and exciting.
We lasted about a year. It’s another loot-based ladder to climb and that’s not our thing. Plus the community fucking sucks. We go back maybe once or twice we last a few months until we realise we have so much raiding to do before we can be competitive in PVP and then we get depressed and go back to our Xbox. It’s shame, I love the engine, I love Blizzards whimsy, I just feel like I’m really not their demographic at all.
Everquest I quit because I wanted to go on vacation, so I sold my account for $600 and used it to buy a plane ticket.
DAoC I quit because of guild drama. I was a kid and leading a guild, and I couldn’t handle the douche bags who wanted to take over the guild, so I gave it to them and left.
FF11 I quit because it sucked.
Guild Wars I quit after about 4 hours because I’m terrible and couldn’t make sense of what the fuck was going on.
CoH I quit because I played a controller, hit lvl 30, and couldn’t solo a single mob of my level because I had almost no ability to deal damage.
WoW I lasted almost 3 years, but eventually quit because of the time commitment, and the game mechanic got boring. Grinding consumables and gold for hours to raid 3 nights a week was absurd, I had to play almost every day to pull my weight. When repeating the same bombing runs and Simon Sez crystal game every day just to run the same dungeon again and again got boring, I canceled.
I have to say, though, that WoW is the best designed MMO yet, but someone needs to break the mold and do it with a polished, slick product like WoW.
SWG because of the NGE
Almost quit Eve when doing lvl4 was get tedious and boring but started an production/trader alt that’s slowly getting my main as he is less time intensive and more fun that I thought.