Games

I finally kicked my Destiny 2 habit by installing Linux, and while I absolutely miss the gameplay and my team, I haven’t really looked back. I’m involved and interested in so many other things now. I still see the odd post that gives ma a pang of FOMO, but the thought of booting into my windows install makes me want to peel my skin off with tweezers.

Not an MMORPG by any means, but I’ve been really enjoying a “Minecraft like” called Vintage Story that is giving me the same feeling. The commodification of Minecraft has finally frustrated me enough and I’m jumping ship.

You should try Old School Runescape if you want an MMORPG without any microtransactions or FOMO/daily grind mechanics.

The cool part with OSRS is that every new feature or update has to pass the player polls, meaning they are unable to add stuff no one asked for. This includes microtransactions, partnerships, battlepasses, etc.

Thing that cured me of my destiny 2 fomo was to get the transmog system to make my character look like a year 1 day 1 player (the broken armor you get when Ghaul takes your light) and then that's my "look" I'm the guy who looks like they've never change their armor. Then I picked one ship and one emblem I liked (Xûr's rock ship, and Strange Coin emblem) and that's it. no more MTX.

I've stopped playing f2p smartphone games entirely cos of this microtransactions nonsense too.

Whenever I feel FOMO, I just remind myself of all the other FOMO items I bought in past games and how much I don't care about them anymore.

So that's great, but halo IMO is the least FOMO inducing mp game on the market with battle passes. You can actually "equip" the season pass you want to level and work on it, the best thing is they never go away so there's literally not a single bit of FOMO, only the illusion. Regardless, I see your point for the other games and I commend you for making the change.

I'm glad I've had a few epiphanies over my gaming time that have resulted in no desire to spend any money on P2W or content skipping.

First one was in the first Turok game on N64. I was playing normally but at some point looked up the cheat codes for things like unlock all weapons, unlimited ammo, and unlocking all levels. There was one weapon that you needed to collect hidden pieces of from each level, and then you only got 3 shots with it that would pretty much AoE clear an area. There was another gun that you'd only find 2 shots of ammo for at a time that was similar. I had fun for a bit running around and shooting those guns at will, but after that it was hard to get motivated to play the game without the cheats because I knew the big weapons were basically just temporary consumables, which meant I'd probably never use them while trying to ration them for moments they'd be most useful. Using those cheat codes ruined the game for me.

The second epiphany was after raiding for a while in WoW and thinking about the loot motivation. It was a circular motivation: you get better loot so that you can raid more to get even better loot. If the loot was the main motivation, then it was pointless because the loot didn't serve any purpose outside of the game. So it only made sense to do raiding because I enjoyed the process, not because of the rewards. And this applied to most reward mechanisms in games. Taking that logic just a bit further made me realize that P2W is actually paying money to avoid playing a game and short circuit right to getting the rewards, which was kinda pointless when the rewards were meant to improve the experience of playing the game. Either a) you don't want to play the game at all, or b) you don't get as much satisfaction from using the better loot or whatever because you skipped the part where you had to do it without those rewards.

And then the last one is finding PvP less satisfying when the game mechanics give significant advantages based on either time spent grinding or paying money to avoid grinding. Did I just win because of my skills or because I've acquired better gear? Did I just lose because the other player outplayed me or because they got better gear? And I didn't even want to give any satisfaction to those who just paid money to win and don't worry about what it does or doesn't say about their skills. It's similar to the line of thought when you know cheating is possible... Did I get beat by someone skilled enough to aim better or someone using an aim bot?

It's refreshing seeing your list since people often blame gachas nowadays, but MMOs were the issue originally, it's just that other genres took a lesson from MMOs so now we have way more grinding options and it gets tiresome.

I left mmos due to my wife spending to much on "free" games for awhile. I miss them in some ways but also am sorta glad. They were easy to over indulge in and I have a lot of responsibilities. single player, buy once and done, games along with streaming shows or movies is so much easier to take or leave. No limited events or dailies or anything.

Yeah I agree with you here. A lot of Trackmania players are annoyed by Trackmania's $20 a year subscription and have called to make it F2P with cosmetic microtransactions, but I'm pretty happy that hasn't happened. There isn't even any DLC. It is really nice to see not have to see ads to pay more money for stuff.

Except for like 3 helm pieces which they released like 15 years ago and have since made available through others means, there's literally nothing beyond a few mounts and pets. So your whole "mounts, cosmetics, miscellaneous" thing is very misleading. Other than that, I agree with you and I'm glad you've managed to get away. Kudos.

Edit: seems I missed a few of sets that they released in the last 4 years. 5 of them to be precise. And a pair of wings and a helm piece. Some of which were given for free to subscribers before being put on the store.