I've described the hedonic burnout that must naturally come from triggering the same psychological reward system over and over for the duration of my World of Warcraft career. And, no hate - if you rode that particular rollercoaster all the way up and all the way down, it was a singular era. I fucking lived there. There is a tower in the starting area outside of Stormwind where my character "lived" and I have a lot of incredibly serious backstory which occurred there. I would pass it, seventy levels later, and think of the hempen blanket and that humble straw which she could afford.
The new character - in Final Fantasy XIV? Catgirl. I'm going a different direction this time.
So, becoming an anhedonic psychological eunuch is certainly part of what made it difficult to get back into the genre. Enough time has passed now that it mostly took Jasmine and Eric talking about trying it out at PAX, because they'd seen the new player experience being shown off on the floor. Square-Enix has gone pretty hard at the last few PAX shows, I think because the main thing they understand on this team is that first and foremost they serve a community. Well, I know where you can find them, and it seems like they might also.
Oh, and uh… their digital store sells a version of the game for 24 fucking dollars that includes every expansion. That might have been the other thing.
The last part that is perhaps more complex is that I had a raid experience once in WoW as a Paladin that installed a mote of shame in my chest that then, through a process of slow accretion, became a dark pearl. I don't know if I ever talked about it before, maybe once, but it has occupied a truly outsized role in how I play those types of games - namely, that I mostly don't. Endgame raiding at least at the time (though I would be surprised if it's gotten less kinky) involved, like, doing homework and stuff. There's videos. And I was in this neither fish nor fowl space with the Pally at the time so I was really only getting slotted because they were my friends, and between uptime and downtime the whole affair was a profound chronological investment that I managed to screw up with a bad cast of Divine Intervention. What the spell actually does is quite complex, but what it did in practice was make me the final boss of that dungeon and I won.
I think if I don't get snared by a particular style of play, I'll be okay. The genre was once fairly staid as games tried to ape World of Warcraft, and so they all felt very samey. The last time I really, really had fun with an MMO was Wildstar but apparently I was the only one. There's a video by Jesse Cox about the differences between WoW and Final Fantasy XIV I found very interesting: he posits that the first is an MMORPG, and the latter is an RPGMMO. It doesn't emphasize the same things. And even when they overlap, as in larger scale raid content, it's trying to accomplish something else. I'm not that that point yet, but I think I know what he means.
I like Jesse Cox in general - we had a really good time playing Acquisitions Incorporated in the Star Wars setting in Aus one year. If you've never seen it, give it a shot - I'm confident when I say that there is absolutely nothing like it.
(CW)TB out.