I've Fallen Out With The MMO

I used to like MMORPGs a hell of a lot.  I had a pretty good group of buddies and we'd always play things like World of Warcraft (up to Lich King) and Guild Wars and we have some pretty fond memories of those days adventuring together.  Even now as I walk around some of these Japanese stores or peruse certain websites on the internet I see shit like Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 and I get all tempted to play one again but something keeps holding me back.

I've fallen out with MMOs pretty hard which is a shame because I do like playing them.  Not too long ago I was streaming Path of Exile with my co worker and we were having a good time but we gave up before too long mainly because I just wanted to play other things.  One of the main reasons I find it hard to give time to MMOs anymore is because of my backlog.  The thing is a couple of hundred titles long so the idea of sitting down and sinking a few hours into a genre of games that essentially don't end feels like a bad idea when I have so much on my plate already.

That's the other thing too, purely multiplayer games that don't end just don't sit well with me personally.  I like to play something alone, with a self contained story that has an ending and a credits roll at the end.  I don't want to have people waiting on me to do a dungeon or have to rely on player run market places to help get ahead.  I play games to chill and having that extra pressure from other players waiting for me to do shit or hold me to some kind of standard that I don't care about (gear score for example)

The one other big turn off with MMOs for me, especially new ones are subscriptions.  For the longest time Free to Play MMOs have existed, tons of them so the idea of paying for a MMO seems silly now.  MAYBE back in the day you could justify it because most F2P MMORPGs sucked massive amount of dick but now things like Guild Wars 2 are free to download and play.  That might be a bad example because there's never been a monthly subscription for those games but you see what I mean?  Why pay for it when  nowadays you can get a good quality online adventure for exactly no money,

MMOs aren't a genre I dislike by any stretch but I just find it difficult to justify sinking so many hours into that genre.  It's a shame because there's a lot of cool looking shit out there and yet I just can't bring myself to download them and give them a try.  Maybe one day when I clear some of this backlog off my list my opinion will change, I can only hope.