After 10,000+ hours grinding, MapleStory's first level 300 player slams the brakes at 299.99 to rant about the MMO and then quit, all on a dev-promoted stream
It's definitely not a publicity stunt. I don't know if you've ever played the game, but it is soul-crushingly grindy because leveling is the game. It's been around for almost 20 years and every year they make it more and more pay to win.
So why didn't he stop playing at level 100 or 200 or whatever but waited with this rant until almost level 300 in a stream with large attention? Pure coincidence? To me it looks like he wanted to go out with a bang and rage bait.
The game has exponential level growth. The amount of time it takes to go from level 1-250 is like the same as the time it takes to go 298-299...everyone has a breaking point.
Edit: The article specified that he was leveling at about .065% per hour at the end. That's over 1500 hours to go from level 299 to 300.
No, I dont and if you truly need to be pedantic a logarithmic curve makes even less sense. It's a generally linear experience curve with each level being about 20-30% more than the previous, but the number get exceptionally large after a while. Level requirements aren't scaled based on time required, they're scaled on number of experience points required.
Edit: Sorry for the Reddit link but the image is too high res to attach in a comment. Exp Curve Visualization
Seriously. Why do gamers spend thousands of hours on games they hate. Life's full of shit to do. Go play something else. Or, God forbid, touch some grass. Why waste the little time you have on earth doing something you don't like.
Why do gamers spend thousands of hours on games they hate.
It's because that "hate" comes from a place of love, and isn't really hate at all. From the outside, it can be hard to understand, but the people who hate certain games the most are usually the biggest fans. They hate seeing squandered potential when something they love gets ruined by updates.
They don't hate the game, itself. They love the game, and they love what it could be under different circumstances. They love the memories they've had with the game, the connections they've made, the experiences they've shared. The "hate" they seem to have isn't really hate at all; it's passion. They love the game and want to see it in a better state. That's why they're so hyper critical, because they care the most.
Yup exactly. They see wasted potential, and that pisses them off. Because there’s something they truly want to enjoy, so watching the devs make seemingly dumb decisions can be incredibly frustrating.
Which is basically the same situation as being in an abusive relationship.
And all the people who keep coming back, knowing it will never actually improve, are ultimately deluding themselves in some kind of way, and are too addicted to want to stop, or too immature or stupid to realize that dedicating a ton of time and energy to something that on net lets you down or harms you is not a healthy way to live.
Try telling that to a Warthunder player, or League of Legends, or anything like that.
They know the games are ruining their lives but uh sunken cost fallacy.
Its always amazed me that people can become addicted to an actual negative experience that has many negative side effects... but half (more?) The games industry is built on that these days.
They're addicted to the high of winning, which happens at random intervals. That's the core of gambling addiction and MOBA addiction. They will win again... eventually. So they keep playing even though losing sucks.
"Over here [in Heroic] it's free-to-play friendly, by a considerable margin," niru begins, talking over a graphic showing the player distribution between the world types, with Heroic leading in global MapleStory by some margin. "Pay-to-win is accepted here [in Interactive World], but the free-to-play experience is awful and that's what needs to be improved right now."
(Edit: it's not made clear in that quote so I'll just mention it here, they play in an Interactive world)
I get addiction is real and it's not easy to quit for some people. What I don't get is that the game apparently has a different world type that is just better and he's actively choosing not to play it instead. That's like picking to play P2W poker where you can buy better hands and then complaining that it's not fun when you could just go play real poker at the next table instead. At some point I just lose a lot of my sympathy for them.