Story time! Last year marked my second year working for an unnamed football stadium, selling unnamed alcohol to rich suite owners and family members of players. Seeing as how the uniform required black shoes, I purchased a slightly cheap pair and used my free time to break them in. As much as I tried, however, I couldn’t get the shoes to properly break in: They were uncomfortable, painful even. Still, I didn’t want to return them (no receipt) and I didn’t want to buy another pair of shoes, so I lived with it, and eventually pain turned into uncomfortable, which turned into not much at all. After a few short months, I found myself sitting on the edge of the bathtub clipping my toenails when I caught a glimpse of my heels: Deep red, scabbed over, torn to shreds. As it turned out, my shoes were gradually grating away at the backs of my feet.
All too often I hear of players who stick with an MMO, despite despising every minute of it, and it makes me think back to this moment. I’m not referring to players who are unhappy with one or two aspects of the game, I mean the person who hovers over the “cancel subscription” button everyday and wonders why he bothers playing, for the one or two minutes he logs in each day to check on patches and updates. I have tried to find an answer to why people would torture themselves in an entertainment sense (or in my case a physical sense) and my only explanation is the player waits too long after they become bored, and eventually lose all interest. Perhaps that player is looking towards the future to some mythical patch that will fix all of his woes, but ultimately that patch will not come. It usually isn’t the one or two mechanics that he puts his blame on, he simply does not enjoy the game, and nothing short of that game becoming some other game will pique his interest. For example, you can fix all the bugs you want on Toontown Online, I still won’t play because the game is for children and is developed for in such a fashion.
So my advice to you players: Do it. Hit that “cancel subscription button.” Trust me, as someone who runs through MMOs like milk cartons, you won’t find that much of a difference in your life without the logging into an MMO to patch it, aside from the lack of a slow drain on your bank account. If you have to go through twenty MMOs to find the one that fits what you are looking for, then so be it. Remember: MMOs are an investment, in both time and money. You don’t finalize a loan, a car, a bank account, or a house without shopping around the competition, and MMOs should be the same.
And remember: Quitting an MMO doesn’t suddenly mean you “hate” the company or the game. Long streaks of boredom happen, especially in long-term grind games. If you feel you may one day regain interest, just do what I do: Leave the game installed. Take a break, play some non-subscription games, and perhaps return during a welcome-back week.
But back to the story: I left off in December, and it is May. Thanks to my unwillingness to ditch my shoes, I still have marks and bruises that have persisted for going on five months, on my heels and the “knuckles” of my toes. You can still see on my heels where the scabs were at one point and, in an event that may be completely unrelated, my shoe size has actually gone down by a half-inch.
I’ve since burned those shoes.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: Don’t let a small issue becoming a glaring problem by ignoring it, or you might find yourself completely turned off of something you once enjoyed (or with a slight hobble).
MMO Fallout 