Brad McQuaid has passed away.

[Draegan]

I played pretty hard for 2 months, but I never got addicted to the game. I got all my catassing out in SojournMUD where most of the EQ design/mechanics were taken from except it was an awesome 3D world. By the time EQ came out I had done 3-5 years of forced grouping and grinding.

[Mandella]

I'll be a little bit of a counterpoint. I don't think I've ever been addicted to MMOs, either that or I am that guy who has been a functional addict all my life.

I still enjoy them, and maintain an active account in several -- but I usually only play one at a time. Catch up, get tired of the setting, and switch to something else. I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing, so I will say MMOs haven't taken over my professional or even personal life, but what they have done is sometimes completely engulf my entertainment time. There are popular shows I'd sorta like to watch, books I'd like to read, but my first choice when I sit down in the evening is to fire up LOTRO or some such.

I think the closest I ever came to feeling I *had* to log in every day was World War II Online (yeah, have a laugh). But the reason for that obsession was that I was playing with real people against other real people, and if you skip time in a team sport/game you always feel you are letting everybody else down. Eventually my Squad became mostly inactive and I took the opportunity to bail out.

As for EQ, sidestepped that one entirely for playing Acheron's Call or Anarchy Online or whatever. Still have friends that play it right now though, maybe I should give it a try...

[Arinon]

Not as bad as some of you here but I remember looking at my /played in EQ and discovered that an average 24h day though my last two years of university had to be split 8/8/8 for school, sleep, and EQ.

Never got the bug quite as bad as that again but several games held me for longer than two years.

[HaemishM]

I've always been pretty good at compartmentalizing, so I will say MMOs haven't taken over my professional or even personal life, but what they have done is sometimes completely engulf my entertainment time. There are popular shows I'd sorta like to watch, books I'd like to read, but my first choice when I sit down in the evening is to fire up LOTRO or some such.

This was me during EQ. It helped that less than a year into my playtime, I started running a guild. Not only did that require a lot of time, it forced me to learn things like how to market the guild so we got recruits, get multiple guilds together to do things like raids and events that only uber guilds could do at the time as well as learn a little bit about leadership and how shitty people can be over the most trivial of things. The fact that the game itself missed a whole shitload of chances to enrich the experience for everyone and instead focused on making more of the same content only harder really made me resent McQuaid a lot. His attitude toward customer service and the shitgoblins he had doing that (Fuck you Abashi) really helped sour me on the whole experience and contributed to the burnout which eventually led me to quit for Dark Age of Camelot. Of course, that game only exacerbated the burnout because of the same goddamn issues.

I find it evilly fitting that in a thread talking about a dude who likely died due to addiction that we're all sort of measuring our addictions to his fucking game.

[Count Nerfedalot]

That whole playing with other people *is* the hook of MMOs. And why the later iterations are much less addicting.

edit to add: I mean the team sport aspect of it mostly.

[Mandella]

That whole playing with other people *is* the hook of MMOs. And why the later iterations are much less addicting.

edit to add: I mean the team sport aspect of it mostly.

Yeah, but it is a subtly different psychology when you are playing with friends against friends (or strangers), especially for virtual territory or rankings. For instance, I largely play MMOs right now with RL friends, and it is not a problem at all for one or more of us to give an excuse and drop out of a planned group instance. But back in WWII Online I knew that the enemy wouldn't respect that absence by not pushing hard right when I wasn't there, so, like I said, different psychology.

On another tangent, I realize that I must have really been out of the EQ circuit, since I never even knew that McQuaid had an addiction problem. Kinda surprises me, since that is the sort of thing you would expect anti-gamers to latch on to and publicize -- "game creator who is an addict makes game leveraging addictive behavior in gamers" sort of thing.

[Falconeer]

The best thing we are missing here is Schild's interview to McQuaid. That is gone forever I think, but it was a wonderful and intense read at the time. I suppose now it would be even more heartbreaking though.

[schild]

Nah I've got it.

[Velorath]

Easy enough to find on the Internet Archive, but I'm not sure this is the time or place for it. "The Hub of All Blame: A Postmortem" is the thread in the News forum (sort by most replies and you'll find it quickly).