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Need Help limiting MMO time
stormcrow704
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
I'm pretty good at limiting the time I spend gaming. Usually I can get work done during the day, family time in the evening, then when everyone has gone to bed I get in a couple hours on steam or playing magic or w/e.
The trouble is the MMOs. I will fall into a game like TOR or WoW or w/e. Before I know it I'm up until 2 or 3 or the morning or worse blowing off work during the day(I run my own business so that's not as cool as it sounds.)
I would like to play the new TOR expansion, maybe even Warlords of Draenor, but I know I would lose years of my life. Vista's parental controls are limited (yes, I still run vista. It came with the pc and I am poor).
I tried researching software that allow me to give myself, say two hours between 9pm and 1am a night to game, but a lot of the stuff I researched looks dated, or something that would just make my computer run slower.
Is there reputable game blocking software out there that is simple, easy to use, and not something that is going to bog down my processor?
Thanks in advanced for any help with this.
The trouble is the MMOs. I will fall into a game like TOR or WoW or w/e. Before I know it I'm up until 2 or 3 or the morning or worse blowing off work during the day(I run my own business so that's not as cool as it sounds.)
I would like to play the new TOR expansion, maybe even Warlords of Draenor, but I know I would lose years of my life. Vista's parental controls are limited (yes, I still run vista. It came with the pc and I am poor).
I tried researching software that allow me to give myself, say two hours between 9pm and 1am a night to game, but a lot of the stuff I researched looks dated, or something that would just make my computer run slower.
Is there reputable game blocking software out there that is simple, easy to use, and not something that is going to bog down my processor?
Thanks in advanced for any help with this.
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If you find yourself losing track of the time, maybe set an alarm for yourself to remind you "Hey, it's 1am, maybe go to bed?".
If you do want an easy to use web filter that can shut off the internet, we use K9 at work. (http://www1.k9webprotection.com/)
It's a free download (up to 3 licenses), doesn't seem to kill PC speed too harshly and can be set up to block whatever sites you want it to, or set to just block the internet between certain times.
But, like I said, you install it, you have the password, you can get around it.
Edit: MMOs are engineered to keep you playing. The treadmill is genuinely endless. They're designed in a way that keeps quests and projects overlapping. When you finish one activity, you will be almost done with another... That's not an accident.
Thanks for the feedback. I was hoping to find something I could program to block certain games. I run an add on for Firefox during the day that blocks Facebook, IGN, etc. But I need the Internet up 24/7 for work (hosting, DLs).
There is nothing better than your phone's alarm clock. If you won't listen to that, you won't listen to anything.
If you can't control yourself with the media probably the best thing to do would be not to play.
Really the check is if you can walk away at any point you get called from and not care, you are safe with an MMO. If you're reply to a "come over here a second" is "just a minute" for the next half hour you probably are in danger mode.
I just wanted to add to this, because I both agree and disagree at the same time. I play, or used to play league of legends a bunch, and those games can routinely take like 45 minutes to complete. By default, it's not okay to be glued to a computer to 45 minutes without being able to walk away from it. For an adult with a job, this is simply too much time.
HOWEVER
If you and your loved one(s) both know and can cooperate nicely with the time restraints of your games, then all of a sudden you can do things like fire up league of legends and play for 45 minutes at a time without the ability to walk away. We're talking things like "don't start a game before dinner," or "if you don't know when dinner is, ask permission to play the next game so you don't accidentally play through dinner time." The same thing goes with "don't start a game close enough to bed time that you're going to want to stay up," etc.
With MMOs especially, I find that the thing that keeps me logged on the most are things I have to finish: dungeons, mostly, or raids if I'm doing that. It's the feeling of "well I can't stop now, people are counting on me." And you're right, and it's rude to stop. But that means you need to take more care about when you start stuff. If you want to go to bed by midnight and a dungeon typically takes you an hour, you don't start a dungeon after 10:30. Give yourself time-and-a-half for the long side of average for what you're doing and you'll always be out by the time you'd want to go to sleep. At that point it's the difference between when your alarm goes off do you go to bed or say "meh." and keep playing.
And as other people have said, if you go with the second one, it's possible you may just need to stop with these games in particular.
I never played WOW until I had a full time job. Without the pre-existing addiction factor they seemed like a rat-race that I didn't have time to get into. The friends I made at level 1 were level 30 by the time I logged back in again a couple of days later. No fun. I could have played it as a single-person game teaming up with random people to do dungeons, but I thought, "Why bother?"
I could have had a lot of fun if I'd got into it as a teenager when I had infinite time.
This is pretty much my life - and also my playstyle now. I solo mostly, I don't raid - I can't commit four hours like that.
I would just like to not have the option to blow a whole day grinding. Right now its easy to control, I don't have any games installed. I'm not going to @#$% with that unless I can figure out a way to block the program most of the day with software that doesn't bork my OS.
a lot of them will have access restriction options in them that would allow you to deny access to specific IPs for only parts of the day.
I host a podcast about movies.
When you have relatively high opportunity costs - a job, RL friends, some combination of girlfriend/boyfriend/otherkinfriend, etc. - MMOs are a terrible use of your gaming time.
Dragon Age 3 and Kingdoms of Amalur are somewhat similar to MMOs in their gameplay, but you can take them at whatever pace you want, and you can beat them. I consider them methadone to the heroin of WoW, et al.
I'll look into that. I think I have figured out what I need to do. Thanks for the help!
Since then I've tried a few other MMO and MMO-esque games, and none of them have really gotten me hooked. That said, I refuse to try WoW ever again. I suspect it'll be the same effect as with TOR or Diablo 3 where I played for a bit and just got bored, but some part of me is afraid I'll get hooked again and I don't have that time any more.
I quit MMO's when I went to grad school and never looked back. Honestly, once I got out of it for a couple of weeks I realized I was much happier NOT playing. The best solution in my experience is to uninstall and cancel that shit.
I do not allow myself to play Raids on anything but fridays or saturdays. No exceptions.
Without raids TSW and DDO are very easy to control as far as time goes.
I've given up EVE online entirely because it's not healthy for my work.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
When I finally realized I had a true addiction to WoW in my early 20s, quitting cold turkey was the only way I could snap out of it. If I tried to set time limits or some of the other self-restrictions you're talking about doing, I'd go right back to old excessive habits in just a few days. When I did my cold turkey quit I mailed all my in-game valuables to friends, unsubscribed, uninstalled, and even stopped non-MMO gaming as well for a few months.
What helped me was accepting that I was fine being a casual. I don't play MMOs to be uber any more, I play them for shared experiences and to feel part of a world. I love games that have bite sized chunks, like WoW dungeons or Warframe missions. I just take the game at my own pace and don't worry if I'm keeping up with the ubers. I abhor grinds for grinding sake - the minute the game forces me to do something I don't find fun, I move on.
I've also started gravitating to games where player skill matters a lot more. LoL was custom made for me. I get to raise numbers over the course of the game, I get to raise numbers on my account, and it's all in relatively predictable chunks of time, so I know when I have time to start another game or not. Warframe is a grind, but I find I enjoy going into missions underpowered and seeing what I can do, rather than the fast runs most of the people in the game prefer. I'm not interested in winning because I put in time - I don't have spare time any more. I want to win because I GOT GUD. It makes the time I spend feel more valuable.
But if for whatever reason you don't want to go down that road, then I'd echo the notion that if you can't stop yourself with a simple alarm, there's nothing out there that will get you to stop because you're supposed to be the adult.
Which I guess begs the question of how much you really want to be playing something that has so much control over you that you can't just stop playing when you want to. And whether you're actually having fun or just plain addicted.
You can always allow someone you trust remote access to install some nannyware or something.
But you know you should make sure you trust them or else they might lock you out from all your games except Bad Rats and Hatoful Boyfriend.
Its a skinner box by design.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php?page=1
You need to understand that MMOs and many games these days are designed to keep you playing. Not by being interesting and creative and magical, but by basically making you pavlov's dog. You go on a raid and land that perfect crit and you get the sound and popup and you respond by feeling oh so good...the bell just rang and you started salivating.
Once you start seeing this and actually understanding that while yes the first time you play the game its magical and new and great its lost all of that. You're now spending hours grinding for nothing, you're doing pointless things because that is the motion you've been doing for so long as so it feels like its what you should be doing. I did Evercrack for a long time and that game got its fangs into me hard and so when WoW and other MMOs came out I looked at them and just had to pass. It wasn't because they didn't interest me because they really did, and that feeling of discovery and something fresh and new in the game really made me want to play, but because I knew that it would become a MASSIVE time sink.
Easiest thing to do if you can't limit yourself is just to walk away. Instead of doing a raid or grind each night for 2-4 hours go out to the gym and lift, do something productive like take a language class to force yourself into a different routine. Its not easy or fun to uninstall cold turkey but if you keep falling back into that trap its about all you can do.
This is why I don't play MMOs. I haven't found them fun for a long time. On top of that I've always found that fact that the game treats us like rats in a cage - paying so we can keep hitting that reward button - really fucking insulting and disrespectful.
I know you can use that argument for basically any game, but at least they're fun and engaging, while MMO's aim to trap you in a never-ending hamster wheel while continuing to charge you money. People who grind loot for a living are called Gold Farmers, but really, I feel like MMO's are farming us.
Almost everyone I knew that played MMO's would never talk to me about how fun the game is once they settled into it over the long term. Instead, they'd tell me about the next big grind they were on, and I could see that they were a little dead inside.
Well okay that last bit is hyperbole, but still!
My point is iRevert is right. When I realise it's basically just a virtual skinner box, I found the whole idea disgusting and lost all interest in being part of that.
I mentioned MMO's and the behavioural mechanics to my Behaviour Modification professor back when I was an undergrad, and she was horrified to learn of their existence. They aren't good.
Don't blame yourself or feel guilty if you are having trouble limiting your time to something moderate. The very design of MMO's aims to defeat that part of your brain that says 'maybe I should stop now'. Behavioural conditioning is quite powerful.
My advice is to walk away and replace it with something productive. OR replace it with a video game that you can play for short bursts and be able to put down. I don't have a lot of time for gaming, so I play things like Titanfall that have rounds lasting 15 minutes. Or I play 'Gungame' in counterstrike because it's meaningless. I can alt tab after I die for several minutes to do some work and it doesn't matter if I get killed in the game.
Please shoot me a PM if you add me so I know to add you back.
When you start a MMO its fresh and new and magical, all of us who played any MMO seriously for a long period of time can tell you stories about just exploring towns or new areas not bothering to do anything else except wander for an hour or two. Or randomly coming across something magical and interesting and being swept up in it, half of my best memories from Evercrack aren't of a specific raid or quest but just some random thing I stumbled upon a group of people doing and joined in.
But then those things are lost, you become jaded, and the game that used to be fresh and magical become stale and you begin to become complacent. But you still hope to get that joy you once had and you hope that farming for that super rare drop will satisfy it but it never quite does. Oh a new expansion pack! Oh more levels! Oh a nerf so I can now build a new character from a previously crap tier race/class! That will make the game fun again right? Right?
Look I'm not going to say that I don't look back on my time in MMOs and say "oh it was a waste of time" because man I have a ton of good memories both of events and people and just that first time I did/saw something. But I can say that for any game that I've played like the TES games or Fable or the Dark/Demon Souls games. While I do miss a number of people that I used to play Evercrack with most of them just replaced the EQ grind with the WoW grind or the Guild Wars grind or the EVE grind. I keep in touch with a number of them still and we do play various other games together but every time they start talking about an MMO or trying to get me to pick up a new one I have to distance myself from them again because its just a grind.
Some of the people I met in EQ still are close friends and I do value that but most of them like myself started to look behind the curtain and see MMOs for what they were, so much so that a few of us started really looking into the game design and just how it keeps people hooked (Protip: Huge number of studies and published papers on this that Mobile/F2P/MMOs will use to keep players playing). But just because MMOs were built that way doesn't mean all games are, you don't have to quit every game just because you can't manage your time in MMOs. So long as you replace that MMO time with some positive and stick with it and manage your time in other games you'll be fine. But if you replace MMOs with some other game and don't replace it with a positive you'll find yourself repeating the grind all over again in a different game.
If you do decide to go through with this, delete your characters. Anything less and you're sabotaging your chances from the start by knowingly leaving yourself a re-entry point.
Games with endings, Games you can be done with after a couple nights and a couple hours.
The years and years and years I was stuck on EQ, I played only EQ, Now that I'm free, I play like dozens of random whatever games a month, while using approximately 1/100th of the time EQ ate away
If it's WoW, there's an undeletion option now for folks who do that.
That said, it does need to be emphasized that the best policy is self-moderation and proper communication between yourself and loved ones. You mentioned this is late night time, right? In that case, when you get Warlords or TOR, do what everyone else is saying and set an alarm. Keep an eye on the time in general, and plan your night around it once you have a routine. Most importantly, if someone is calling you away from the game, or asking you to go to bed, drop what you're doing ingame and do it. Doesn't matter who you're playing with, or how much time you have left, just say good night, log off, and turn off the comp. Once you force yourself to do that the first few times, it'll stick.
If it's a general stigmatism towards MMOs that you're trying to work out, then I'd recommend trying some other MMOs too. It's true that they're all trying to hook you in some way or another, but they're not all aspiring to copy the EQ/WoW model - there have been a fair share in the past few years actively running away from it. Give it a try - you might find some other MMOs out there that scratch that itch without keeping you up until 5 in the morning.