I’m curious how much time most people play MMORPGs. I honestly play about 10 hours a week average. That is really not much. It seems like everyone that started playing when I did has hit 60 and has been there for a while. I’d be thrilled to find a guild filled with people that have no interest in their level but instead focus on playing and having fun together. Are there any guilds dedicated to “slow play” or consider themselves “casual”? How about a guild for the family man or working man? Perhaps a guild with level caps based on the calendar. Maybe it’s been tried and doesn’t work, but it would be so great to have a group of regular people playing that don’t play all the time. Perhaps what I am looking for is a role-play guild. I look at our guild sheet in game and see that around 70% of the guild is level 60. I am *always* the lowest player online in the guild.
Am I all alone here?
During the first couple of months I played 6 – 8 hours a night during the week after work, and about 15 hours over the weekend. I don’t play that much now, well except I’m currently unemployed so I probably play more at the moment.
Why don’t you start a guild for people like you? I’ve played with several “mom’s” that would probably join a guild like that.
Nah, people like you (and me, I imagine) are in the majority. You’d never know it from reading the WoW forums where people while about nothing to do at level 60…but for every catass there’s thousands of guys that play casually. In EQ2 I was in a guild specifically for people with jobs, families, etc. and we had to stop taking people after we hit like 80 in just two days after making a forum post. Same thing when I was in SWG.
The casual people are out there but you gotta go find them since were usually too busy IRL to post on the boards. heh.
Flashman has it; the very fact that any of us are even reading game forums or gaming blogs marks us out as pretty ‘hardcore’. Most truly ‘casual’ players wouldn’t make it that far. I suspect being in any Guild at all represents a similar level of dedication and commitment. Most people with limited time to play will probably get by on soloing and/or pick groups alone.
Oh, and regarding the initial question, I spend at least as much time as full-time job (37.5 hours) a week on PC games which is frightening in itself, but of that, I’d say only about half of that is in MMORPGs, and that’s split between about three of them currently. When in them, I tend to potter about, being a 90%+ Bartle ‘Explorer’ type, so don’t really level much anyway.
Time spent playing doesn’t necessarily equal xp gained – a lot of it is about personal goal-sertting and boredom threshold. :)
My (cross-game) guild has a lot of people in with similar play times to what you describe. The problem we’ve found is that while we have plenty of people who only play 10 hours a week, they don’t play the _same_ 10 hours, so while they don’t find themselves the lowest member of the guild by far, they still have noone to group with.
I run about 25-30 hours a week of game time.