Disneyworld is fun. However, I think if you went every weekend, you would lose a lot of the magic. Many MMOs are the same for me. Fun, but if you play a lot, you can lose the magic. Sometimes, bringing someone new along awakens the magic once again. I have been experiencing this in World of Warcraft lately, with my wife playing an MMO for the very first time. I can see the fun and magic all over again. I also experienced it in The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar.
Last weekend was a whole bundle of fun events and I’d like to share some them.
We were playing our level 26 blood elf hunter duo and just doing some regular quests when I thought it might be fun to show my wife Shadowfang Keep. We spent some time playing around in there and eventually I decided to have my brother bring his level 70 mage over to show the whole Keep to my wife. Little did I know how much fun we would have watching him round up 30 monsters and then killing them all in three seconds. It was hilarious. We had so much fun that we did it again and had our son watch too. He was laughing so hard, it was great.
Later on, we were on a quest to collect 8 troll charms from Thistlefur Hold just north of Astranaar. Once we got to the back of the cave, we noticed a polar bear in a cage with a quest marker. His name was Ruul Snowhoof and he needed our help to escort him out of the cave. We did so, and just as we exited the cave, two alliance players attacked him. They probably just thought it was a normal mob, but it flagged them for pvp. Since they failed our quest for us, I decided to pay them back with a coordinated two hunter attack. We killed both of them, one as he was running away – the little chicken. So that was my first taste of pvp and it felt good, but mostly because it had real purpose to me. It was payback for what they did to us. Major league fun.
Finally, I took my little fat Hobbit for a journey to Michael Delving in The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Along the way, I was asked to deliver some mail. The trick is that it had to be delivered quickly, and you needed to avoid having any nosy Hobbits see you. I had so much fun running through the woods and over the paths all the while trying to avoid the nosy Hobbits. The was a chain of deliveries, and I did manage to be seen by one nosy Hobbit so I had to start that one stage over. I’d be running along and spot a Hobbit. Sometimes it was just a hungry Hobbit and I could keep running, but other times it was a nosy Hobbit and off into the woods I went. It really was exciting, and I found myself running through this one swamp area trying to avoid getting the mail soggy and hoping nothing evil attacked me. It truly was one of the more fun quests I have done in a long time.
– Ethic
“Disneyworld is fun. However, I think if you went every weekend, you would lose a lot of the magic. Many MMOs are the same for me. Fun, but if you play a lot, you can lose the magic. Sometimes, bringing someone new along awakens the magic once again. I have been experiencing this in WoW lately, with my wife playing an MMO for the very first time. I can see the fun and magic all over again. I also experienced it in The Lord of the Rings: Shadows of Angmar.”
I can ring nothing out but agreement with you on both fronts, Ethic. After about 1 month into the expansion I sort of grew tired of WoW all over again. I came to the realization that I was falling behind in my guild, I never had the time or patience for PUGs, and that in the end at level 70 I was likely going to miss out on raiding, and probably the decent arena teams as well, due to my casual nature.
But then the exciting happened… the invigorating happened. My wife, done with college finally, got bored one weekend and asked me to restart her long dormany WoW account that she had barely ever used. I brought in a Draenei Shaman to mesh with her Human Rogue, and we’ve been having a blast together.
A lot of nights I’m unable to assist her because I’m too busy working on LotRO Vault stuff, but she plays on, enjoying the same sense of fun that I can remember having over 2 years ago when I first logged onto WoW’s beta client. It’s really amazing how bringing someone you know into the game can re-energinze your desire to play it. Somehow their unfamiliarity with it can make you realize why you started playing and liked playing it for long in the 1st place… it’s fun. It’s a game. It’s a past-time not a competition or job.
My wife, longtime adversary to WoW (during my deep parts of addiction, seriously, back in early 2005), is now playing the game and enjoying it like I once had. And in doing so, she’s made me actually anxious to log into my level 65 and see the content… not just worry about dinging that next level or whether or not there will be a spot for me on a raid or in the arenas.
And lastly, to round out this overly long reply… I had the exact same feelings in LotRO this past weekend during the stress-test. I’ve been playing the game and “testing” it since August. Though I love it, I’ve been /bugging the thing the whole time, rarely letting myself “play” in Middle-Earth. But this weekend, there were trivia contests during the stress-tests, and hundreds of people were chattering and talking about the game in the chat channels. It was like a prelude to launch day, and made me realize just how much I was looking forward to making LotRO my new MMO home.
I agree. All things in moderation.
That being said, is there any way to keep playing one game and still maintain the “newness” that it originally housed?
For me, I break up the MMO experience into categories. Exploration, Leveling, Raiding, PvP, Collecting, Questing, Socializing, Player Events, etc. When I get burned on one I find that the other is a refreshing deviation. It’s nice to go back and try something new.
So yeah, maybe in the game you’re currently exhausting you’re not quite at the point where there’s this onslaught of excitement because everything is new… but it’s great to go back and try something you’ve never done.
I noticed something interesting once my wife finally got her beta invite for LOTRO too: the newness factor for LOTRO also seems to have created a comfy factor for WoW.
We’ve been having fun with LOTRO and I was beginning to suspect that we might finally be WoW’ed out and found the Next Thing, but the newness is a different kind of excitement. New quests, new game play, new areas to explore, the whole nine yards.
The thing I didn’t expect was that dropping back into WoW now has a sort of warm fuzzy comfy feeling with our regular weekly group now. Most of the old annoyances just don’t seem to matter and because so much is so familiar, we can just have a good time with our little group.
Who’da thunk it? 1+1=3
Well, I had a a similar experience tonight, but in EvE. To me, EvE has been getting tiresome. But tonight, I actually went headlong into a suicide mission with an old friend and something magical happened. Just seeing us ganged together, rushing in where even fools fear to tread… it evoked a sense of correctness… of being at one with the cosmos… hell, it was just cool.
It’s been what seems like an eternity since I was ganged up for a mission, and I have to say it was the brightest point in the last couple months of the game.
What does this have to do with this thread? Well, I think the heart of the discussion, is how we get more out of things we take for granted, when we can share the experience. And that transcends the game itself… it’s deeper than just killing X number of foes, or even seeing something we’ve yet seen… I think it’s that elusive rabbit all of us MMO players chase, but seldom see…
It’s the fun to be had when we share our experience with another like-minded soul… and we somehow feel closer to the world.