18
Dec
2019

When your MMO has a “no addiction” Reddit…

categories: MMORPGs; word count: 520 words

This is when you should know that you have a serious problem, Blizzard.

Please note that this is not me “knocking” the Reddit for existing, as it clearly has a purpose and has helped a lot of people curb their addiction to World of Warcraft. It is doing a great thing by existing. I acknowledge that it needs to exist. What I am “knocking” is the fact that this Reddit even needs to exist in the first place.

I am “knocking” the fact that a sizable number of people are getting, or have gotten, addicted to World of Warcraft and that this is occurring in a disproportionately high number with this MMO than it is with any others out there. You don’t hear about this happening with other MMOs in anything other than trace numbers, adjusting with the fact that there are individuals out there who will get addicted to any MMO, any game, or anything that crosses their path (since I am not shaming anyone for addiction, that I know that addiction is something that an individual can not in any way help, and realize that someone may, say, get addicted to the latest Final Fantasy MMO because it crossed their path and World of Warcraft did not…).

I am also “knocking” the fact that with an MMO this size, and with the number of people that have gotten addicted to it, that Blizzard has done nothing to curb this or even mitigate it in any way. After all, their addiction lines Blizzard’s pockets. Being as vague as possible, I actually knew someone that was offered a lucrative job that could have turned into a career that World of Warcraft messed up for them. This didn’t even materialize into a job for them. They went right back to playing World of Warcraft after this job offer fell through for them, and I am almost positive that they continue to play World of Warcraft to this day not realizing, and probably not caring, how big of a problem that this is — that this is actually addiction if this cost them an actual job. They probably rationalize it as “this job not being worth it”. They are, or were, someone that I had known for a long time, and after this I honestly never want to hear from or see again. I don’t want them around my children. And although I just said up there that I am aware that addiction is something that a person can not help, rationalizing away one’s addiction, and treating people horribly is something that can be helped, and this is absolutely something that this person would do, so I don’t want them around me because that would expose my children to them and that is something that I do not want.

Based on my last interaction with this person years ago, they were plainly emotionally abusive to me.

At some point, Blizzard has to realize that their MMO is this addictive and step in, though.

The question is, when? When will they stop turning a blind eye to this level of addiction in their players?

17
Dec
2019

Always online? Really, Diablo 3?

categories: MMORPGs; word count: 383 words

As an adolescent, I grew up playing Diablo 2.

Many afternoons after school, after I had done my homework and studied for a sufficient amount of time, were spent grinding and leveling up characters. Many afternoons during the summer were spent playing it. So as an adult, when I found out that Diablo 3 was finally being made, I was stoked. Absolutely stoked. It was something that I could introduce to Bub. Everything that I heard about the game from the announcement that it was actually coming into existence all the way until day one sounded extremely promising, and then when it finally came out and I purchased it, put it on my computer, and was installing it, there was the realization that something about it was undesirable, almost not worth playing, but not quite…

You always had to have an Internet connection if you wanted to play it on the PC, which at the time was the only way to play it. No Internet connection? No way to play it. Because trust me, it was going to check. Even if you wanted to play a single player game, it was going to check. And you weren’t playing if it wasn’t there.

This literally almost made the game not worth playing to me, but I was committed to introducing this game to Bub, and I was going to play it with him. We were going to get through this together. We did. …narrowly.

When I found out that a port to the Nintendo Switch was coming out, and that this port did not require constant Internet connectivity in order to play, I jumped on that and purchased a copy of the game to play with Bub. So far, that copy has been a lot more enjoyable to play with him. It also makes one of his favorite games portable, which means that we can take it with us when we need to sit in the waiting rooms of doctor’s visits and specialty visits (as Bub is autistic and has severe social anxiety, so being able to distract him with something that can calm him down enough to get him through a distressing situation is always good to have on hand). We actually prefer the Nintendo Switch version by far though, come to think of it.

16
Dec
2019

In which we go the opposite way!

categories: RPGs; word count: 450 words

Although I can’t say that Bub hated it (although I swear, killing Caius was probably his favorite thing about the entire game, and his end goal, even though he didn’t seem to hate Caius… he just wanted him dead), I could tell that he preferred Final Fantasy XIII to Final Fantasy XIII-2. And although I liked Final Fantasy XIII a lot, I’m not even going to lie — I loved the fact that Final Fantasy XIII-2 was almost immediately open-world.

Sure, you had to do certain things to advance the plot… but you could also do a whole lot of optional things, and there was no timer on it like a certain game that I’m going to talk about in the next post you’ll see that you probably already know the name of. You could do what you needed to do to advance the plot of the game, and you could do whatever optional things you wanted to do, at your leisure. And that’s exactly what I loved about Final Fantasy XIII-2. That, and the fact that Serah was the lead heroine of the game. I’m not even going to lie. I loved that about the game as well. You also only had two (three, if you wanted to fill the third space up with a creature that you caught, which is wise… we eventually caught a Silver Chocobo as soon as we could and leveled it up) characters to worry about leveling, which takes a bit of stress out of leveling a whole bunch of characters. Although Final Fantasy XIII had an enjoyable cast, you had to make sure that all of them were equally battle-ready, because sometimes you controlled them at different times.

Actually, in most games you need to make sure that your entire cast is equally hardy for battle.

At first, I tried to defeat the final boss in this game without equipping my Bub for the final fight. I just wanted to see if I could do it on my own. All it took was Caius slamming Serah and Noel’s faces into the ground for me to realize that it was a foolish idea. So I went and leveled a bit more, then did the proper thing, equipped my Bub, and Bub proceeded to teach Caius a thing or two about insulting his mom, followed by slamming Caius’ dragons’ faces into the ground whittling down their HP until all three of them were at zero just to teach him another lesson. Because you don’t ever insult his mother even when his mother tries to go it solo.

And that gets us to Lightning Returns, which is where we are at in our Final Fantasy gaming saga.

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