Generally speaking for a lot of people, they end up becoming detached from it. It’s happened to me with many interests including bands and hobbies (as non-gaming example).
With games, it has been no different. I’ve always considered myself a casual gamer given how I don’t play many titles and genres (like I am not into first person shooters). Wizardry, Ancient Art of War, Ultima, Diablo, StarCraft were just a few early titles that I spent a lot of time in, only to find something else that managed to capture my attention. I usually ended up (with loot based games) giving away stuff so I know that in Diablo II, I dropped a lot of loot in an open game (on the closed Battle.net realm) once I knew I wasn’t going to be playing much anymore.
As a fan of the ARPG genre, Diablo III and Path of Exile naturally were of interest to me; I started this blog because of the former but it ended up degenerating along with my play time in that game. Path of Exile didn’t last that long for me so I never did reach the point of playing it for more than a couple of hundred hours; I ended up becoming more enamored with the race events as opposed to sinking time into my actual characters. The other reason I never fully got into it was the combat and character movement (personal preference) which was understandable since Chris Wilson covered that earlier by stating they had to make choices and they chose to spend their funding on content first as opposed to the technical rigging for character animations (but he also reiterated they would keep working to improve that as time went on).
This blog documented my declining play time and eventual termination of my playing Diablo III. If it weren’t for heavy account binding, I would’ve given away a bunch of loot and gold. Most all of the people I knew had quit long before as well so I was sort of the last person in the group to give up the ghost. Once I stopped logging in, I became almost 100% detached from the game. A lot of the prior criticism about the game was done because you really only do that when you care a lot about something. Once I became disengaged, I basically stopped caring about the state of that franchise (which is something no franchise owner/operator should ever want to hear).
I also stopped playing StarCraft II around the same time (this was right when Legacy of the Void launched). I was only part way through the campaign and I just stopped. Which in some respects, was ironic because I’ve played Protoss for the longest (since classic StarCraft) and here I was not even playing through their story line campaign. I also hadn’t played multiplayer in awhile nor had I kept up with all the balancing changes so I knew it was effectively over in terms of even trying to bother with getting back into it. I went from pretty much a loyal Blizzard Entertainment customer to someone who hasn’t touched any of their games since November 2015.
All of this ended up coinciding with picking up playing the North American/EU version of Devilian. I never did talk about playing the Korean or Thai versions because it would have required trying to explain everything (which would not make sense unless there was an actual english equivalent to at least compare to).
As it turned out, there ended up being major differences anyway to where they really aren’t the same. Devilian (Trion Worlds) ended up occupying 2016 and parts of 2017 for me. But now after just 1.5 months of barely playing (I log in and run tower), that desire to even login is fading rapidly. Not having Patron (specifically due to Red-eye rewards) turns out to be very liberating. There was a time when I was certain I would see at least level 60 through. Now, I am not sure since I have begun playing Soul Worker Online while continuing with my completely Patron free nomadic style play in ArcheAge.
Trion has done an “excellent” job at driving away the larger majority of their customers across all their games. In a niche MMO like Devilian, you really see and feel it. In ArcheAge, my main character is still on Morpheus. After 3.0 “Fresh Start” (aka what I refer to as Fail Start), what was once one of their most active North American servers, has become “deserted” in the context of that game.
That is relative to the overall larger player population of ArcheAge though. The current running Ghost Wedding Festival shows there are still a lot of players on the server but definitely no where as much prior to 3.0.
Devilian on the other hand is really down to low 3 digit numbers on Bolton when it comes to actual individuals (there are a lot of alt characters for example; I am one of them with ten level 58’s, one 54, and one 56; it isn’t going to get any better without actual newly designed content (which I will be covering in a separate post specifically related to guilds). Like gear score ranking on Bolton (by looking at the tempest since it is paywalled) shows under 1000 total rankings at the 100th placed part which is just a level 21 character (as of the time of this posting). Many people have an average of at least 3-4 characters in this game so that is telling as far as extrapolating the approximate number of players that currently remain engaged with the game.
A day or so ago, I logged into my berserker for the first time in over an year. I was almost about to do the obligatory “is this game dead yet?” in announce chat but there was someone troll spamming it (which made me laugh a bit since I still remember early on after launch how annoying announce chat was where it was constant bull every second where that garbage went by so fast; now, it is dead by comparison).
I could have livened things up by taking some pot shots at DA’s guild leadership but I don’t use announce chat that way in terms of firing the first shot; the only time I fire back is when provoked/wronged erroneously right in the game. It wouldn’t matter anyway since some of them have done a good enough job at telling enough lies to paint me as the bad one who did little to contribute to where they are at today which is fine because karma does have a way of rearing its head.
The point is that my overall engagement in this game is quickly dwindling just like the countless others who sunk in even more time and tons of money only to end up stopping, trying to come back, but not even bothering to try to catch up with gearing again. Power crept dungeons is not going to cut it and even though the beginning of level 60 is coming up, this is sort of like how I just did not see Legacy of the Void all the way through even though earlier, playing through the Protoss story line was something I had been waiting for since the Heart of the Swarm expansion. Actual newly designed content would obviously change that but that would require Bluehole Ginno to do the equivalent of pulling the rabbit out of the hat.
For this game, I will probably make a recording where I blow up everything; salvage the gear, drop every artifact, drop every level 4 rune, etc. when I am finally done since that is what some Koreans do just because they can (and to go out with a trololololo bang). 😀
