Playing my first non-vanilla run with Krastorio right now, and it feels like I'm playing a whole new game. I can basically kiss my life goodbye... again.
Not many people have played it I'm sure, but imagine this:
You've just downloaded a new free MMO. You figure it's gonna be super pay to win, but it's free so why not give it a shot anyway.
For the first few minutes, after you stop being confused by the UI, you start to take everything in. There are no classes, you can do whatever you want. Want to be a mage AND a warrior? Totally doable. Want to be a bard playing in the town square for tips? Thanks to the robust music system, you can. In fact, you're having trouble finding anything you can't do.
A few months later, things are progressing nicely. You've mastered every skill, played thousands of songs by now, got some pretty good gear, and you haven't encountered even a hint of the p2w you expected. Life is great. However, you're going to need a bit of a gear upgrade before tackling this next dungeon. You check how much it'll cost you. 300 million.
You've never even seen more than 50 million in one place before. Nevertheless, you figure with hard work, you can achieve it. After a month, you've gathered about 100 mil by exploiting market bubbles to sell anything valuable as fast as possible and in as large of quantities as possible. It's still not enough though. The cash shop begins to beckon you. You could pay a little real money to buy a cash shop item, and sell it for gold.
But you realize that in order to get the 200 mil you need, you'd need to spend over 100 dollars. You rationalize to yourself that hey, the p2w isn't that bad if it's easier to make the gold in game than it is to make the real money to buy it. You continue on your quest, but you run into an issue. There just aren't any more bubbles to exploit. You've crashed the market in your quest to obtain all the gold you need without spending a penny. You cave, and buy just a couple cash shop items to sell and make up the difference. You get your shiny new equipment. You feel powerful. It's such a huge upgrade it's almost ridiculous. You feel like 20$ was worth it to have this much fun. Out of curiosity, you check to see how much your next upgrade will cost.
2 billion. It's too late. You're addicted. Sunk cost fallacy has kicked in. You've already invested in your character, and that next upgrade is gonna cost you 2000$.
You can't quit. You've tried. There's just no game like this anywhere else. You will spend that money eventually, no matter how hard you try to avoid it.
This is my story. I'm aiming to get that gold without spending a penny. It's been months. I'm half a percent if the way there. It's not gonna happen. Every day I have to pull myself away from that cash shop. It would be so easy, but so irresponsible.
But one day I will spend that money. The game is insidious like that. The only way to avoid it is to either not play the game in the first place or not give a shit about progressing. I am in neither camp.
Genuinely, I love the game, but every day I pray it gets shut down before I have the chance to pay in that much money. It's so hard to stop myself.
Dude. Uninstall it, walk away, get a hobby with that $2000. Something you always wanted to do that's on your bucket list. There's no way playing a P2W game was on your bucket list.
Buy a guitar, take some lessons. That would be way more fulfilling than playing something in a virtual town square for imaginary tips.
I know you're joking, or at least half joking, but I literally am getting help for this. I have psychiatric appointments constantly to deal with how easily I get addicted to things and occasionally try meds to try to improve my impulse control.
I haven't quit the game because my psychiatrist and the few therapists I've gone through feel the game's actually been a net positive on my life, and the real problem is my impulse control. If I wasn't drooling over a 2000$ staff I'd be buying 2000$ worth of 40k minis that I'll never actually get around to putting together and painting. That actually already happened a little bit during a brief period where I quit the game, and I did indeed buy a bunch of 40k shit I still haven't assembled.
2 billion. It’s too late. You’re addicted. Sunk cost fallacy has kicked in.
I think the Sunk cost kicked in by the time you chose to spend money to get those 200 mil, since you were "already a third of the way" and "worked so hard already"
I've played a different one and resisted spending cash. One day I felt depression getting worse over my addiction to that game and had given all of my accounts to other players and uninstalled everything. It felt kinda bad for a week or two but then got better. I'd say you still can win that
Minecraft. There's always another automatic farm to create, a new cave to explore and a new mod to try out! Not to mention the fun that multiplayer brings...
I'm currently playing a modpack called Divine Journey 2 which I started back in the middle of October. 280 hours in and still in chapter 11 of the quest book (30 chapters in total) and it's still addictive and enjoyable.
thanks for the recommendation! i have been slowly getting into modpacks. just tried this out for a few minutes and already look forward to exploring more tomorrow.
I found Elite: Dangerous incredibly cool. How many chances will we get to explore some version of our solar system? I know the game feels empty, but I found it relaxing for the same reason truck simulator is relaxing, just cruising and enjoying the scenery
I end up resubbing every few years and just spin something cool endlessly, or get caught in WIS (RIP), or the ship map thing, or the exoplanet research project (RIP). I was really pissed the last time though at how expensive it has become. And I didn't like the covid research minigame.
She died doing what she loved - building an intricately smoothed Elf caravan killbox, decoratively carved with masterwork pictures of dead trees.
Tragically her lover pulled the lever while she was still inside.
The day I quit that shit, such a huge burden lifted off my shoulders. I felt the same with Ragnarok Online before that and a stupid gacha a couple years after WoW. But nothing was as strong as the WoW quitting experience. No more chasing that rare spawn. No more soloing the old raids weekly on multiple characters in an attempt to get that 1% drop mount or a missing transmog piece. No more dailies. No more arena/bg capping. No more stupid farm. No more relisting AH items every hour to undercut competition during sleep hours. No more gearing Alts so they can join main raids in case one is needed.
The only thing I miss is the gruesome rigor in our attempts to get realm first on an insignificant, casual pvp server, just to stay in top1000. 5/7 raid nights. 6PM to drop dead. But lots of booze and banter on TS. Fun times.
I want to like Rimworld so much, but without mods it's unplayable, and with them the game stops being fun. Rimworld misses something, I I can't put my finger on it.
Starfield. People played for 700 hours then wrote a bad review then play for another 300 hours . Bro if you put 1000 hours into a game there was obviously something you liked about it.
It’s a great example. Starfield (like other BGS games) does a lot of things well that few other games do at all. So it’s frustrating when they put out a game that is pretty mediocre outside those few strengths, and also your only real option for scratching those particular itches.
To be fair, starfield could be simply addicting, and addicting doesn't mean a player can't find the game underwhelming. I spent a lot of time on cookie clicker and in retrospective it was boring, but I kept playing because the numbers were going up. What saved me was clearing my browser's cookies (lol) and loosing my progress.
Your comment got me curious, so I did some digging. Unfortunately Steam caps out filtering reviews at "above 100", so I couldn't find a way to get data on the difference between 100-200 hour players vs 500-1000 hour players for example. But I broke it down by 0-24 hours, 25-49 hours, 50-99 hours, and 100+ hours to see the results.
Unsurprisingly, folks who played it for less than 25 hours liked it the least, with an average of 50% positive reviews. This is also the largest sample size by far, accounting for 51,686 of the roughly 140,000 reviews.
More surprisingly however, the next three data sets (25-49, 50-99, and 100+), order themselves naturally from "most positive sentiment to least". Essentially, the longer you play it after 25 hours, the more likely you are to rate it negatively.
Breaking it down:
0-24 hours: 50% positive reviews out of 51,686 players.
25-49 hours: 69% positive reviews out of 34.644 players
50-99 hours: 64% positive reviews out of 30,775 players
100+ hours: 61% positive reviews out of 22,800 players.
Oh, and because I just reread your comment, I checked out the 1-10 hour players as well, and your guess there was accurate.
40% positive reviews out of the 27,316 players in that range.
And given that there were more negative reviews in the 0-24 hour range than reviews from people who even played it for more than 100 hours, I would say you were mostly right about the guess that players who played it for a very extensive time and reviewed it negatively were a minority. Even if that minority was made up of about 8,900 reviews, or roughly 6.3%.
While this is far from a "definitive scientific test", the data on Steam seems to indicate that among people who liked the game enough to put significant time into it, the more they played, the less likely they were to rate it positively.
Every time I go to try it. “Tf do all these words mean?” I have no idea what is going on. I need to sit down with a guide or something. But got distracted by ESO and was able to dive in immediately so I guess it’ll be 20 years before I repeat the process.
There's a steep learning curve as far as the basics go, but once you level up a frame, a couple decent weapons and some basic Mods (stat-up accessories), it might get you for good. I played if for years and it was pretty fun.
One of the big stumbling blocks is that level up by itself doesn't do anything but open up slots for Mods, it doesn't increase your stats. You need good mods and to rank them up to actually get stronger.
I tell people it's the funnest game you'll ever hate. It's cathartic as hell when everything is running smoothly, but it just takes one little bump to throw everything off.
Yeah I just wish the lemmy ONI community was a bit more active. I should be above 2K hours in now too, and I haven't won yet. My current run I'm trying to get up to 20 dupes while also trying my first attempt at something magma power.
Ark. The original anyways, I refuse to buy 1.5. It was a poorly optimized piece of shit full of broken crap yet I couldn't stay away. That is, until, it became so bloated I couldn't fit it on my SSD anymore.
The only saving grace on it was that if you were on private servers that were mostly PVE, you could just capture them all in cryopod and then you only had to log in like once every two or three weeks instead of every 3 days cuz all you have to do is generator
I did all my time in single player because if I got to some dumb unoptimized/bug I could cheat my way back because fuck them. I too will not buy this BS 1.5 either. They had their chance. I’m still bitter that instead of fixing the base game they got dollar signs in their eyes and just started releasing dlc.
Everyone was pissed when they started putting out DLC in a busted ass early access so they just went all 'mission accomplished' and said the game was done.
I wish SE has more PvE or missions. I switched to Dyson Space Program recently as it has PvE in the recent update but I'm probably gonna go back to SE.
It's one of my favorite games of all time. But choose a wrong setup and you're screwed. Don't get anything before heading out you're dead. Attack a peasant, dead. Go in that cave, dead. Get winded before doing anything, dead and frustrated.
Brew a bunch of Fortify Intelligence potions, drink them, brew some more, repeat. Later make Fortify Strength potion, gives 1000+ strength for over an hour, one hit kill everyone.
If I recall correctly you meet a guy who did that with agility (or was it acrobatics?) just after leaving Seyda Neen. It didn't end well for him.
(Also, I haven't played that damn game in probably over two decades; how the fuck do I still remember that town's name..? How the fuck do I still remember Fargoth..!?)
I can see every single example taking that much time, but Skyrim? Is there really 3000h+ worth of content in that game that doesn't get boring after first time you do it?
I feel like you need to be introduced to mods. There are...a lot. Even if you keep it to just relatively high quality ones that add content (rather than mechanical overhauls or graphical overhauls), there are still a lot.
I'd suggest Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, The Hanging Gardens, The Maelstrom and vicn's mods (Vigilant, Glenmoril and Unslaad) as a starting point.
Actually, that's not true, I'd recommend Legacy of the Dragonborn as a starting point, then grab mods that require it and mods that require those until you have all the content mods that can have displays in the museum (which includes all the ones I mentioned before, but is not limited to them).
I got out of the cycle when I finally realized how many cheaters there are. Worthless to play an extraction shooter under those circumstances. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LfGcDB7Ek
The problem is that there is no alternative. Every other game fails to give me the dopamine rush that tarkov can. So I probably won’t escape anytime soon, even if it means spending thousands more hours dying to blatant cheaters.
Rimworld is one of those games I'm addicted to for like 2 weeks non-stop.
Then once I have 30 colonists and they can't even keep the floor clean cuz I have too many things going on, I'm done because i know I'll never "finish" anything. Even though every time I start that game I tell myself I'll finally build the spaceship this time.
Nobody builds the spaceship. Nobody I know has ever built the ship, unless they were playing the save our ships mod (I think that's the mod name IDK I don't use that one) but then that's not end game
I just accepted that I will only ever lose and it's fine
To be fair, "it takes one to know one" kind of applies here. I played a whole heap of D2, right from the launch.
I was one of the dumbasses who paid for the base game, and the two abysmal DLCs to follow, and then for forsaken.
Forked out only for all of the content to be either made free to play / taken away and 'vaulted' (not that anyone would really miss it).
Friends would keep telling me to hop back in after every expansion and I genuinely wonder how their rotten formula can still keep such a wide audience invested.
I loved the in-the-moment gameplay and the narrative arc they had going there for a while. Despite myself I'm still invested in some of the characters... but it's one of those games where I really recognized how all-consuming the engagement treadmill I had been on once I stepped away. It's probably a good thing for me that it's in the shitter at the moment, or I could easily get lured back in.
Oh, and the r/DtG mods deleted my highly-upvoted Lightfall "lore/prediction" shitpost that was a massive wall of text winding up to an Attack on Titan pun, so fuck 'em.
Yeah. I’m so captured by the setting and enough of the characters that I’m seeing the light and dark saga through to the end, but I largely agree with the sentiment towards the game at the moment. I’ll let the studios next release come out and really gauge my interest carefully. Bungie has set my personal style for gamefeel and almost every game I enjoy, I enjoy due to its moment to moment similarity to destiny. Robo Quest, Metal Rising: Hellsinger, Bullets Per Minute, to name a few PvE based games.
That goes all the way back to playing halo on 2 original Xbox’s wired together in the attic of my friends barn at 3am, and even back to Marathon as a younger kid. On top of that, compared to pretty much every other major FPS title, the studio stands behind a lot of causes I align with. The representation in the game, and seeing myself and people like me present in destiny’s vision of the future un-ironically gives me a warm feeling.
I was just talking with some friends that an extraction shooter with world events the complexity of destiny raids would actually be super cool. A fireteam activates a raid (like sea of thieves forts) and begins diving into it, but then other teams can follow them in as the original groups clears encounters and puzzles. Maybe the teams following them in have some smaller scale mechanics to do, then there’s a heavy fight back out with whatever loot. Could make for the gameplay loop gambit could have been. I think the studio has potential to do the PvEvP really well, but we shall see.
I hear KSP 2 is good now that they added career mode. I've been holding off getting back into KSP just because of the time suck factor of it. But might have to check it out again.
Seriously, some parts of the task line take months to finish. You better finish those 20 four story buildings in order to get to Donald's Dreamland. And if you didn't train your gags before this point then good luck.