Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jayschwa | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of an anecdote I once read or heard about a person curing their World of Warcraft addiction. The person used an unofficial server with cheats to instantly get the best gear, then proceeded to one-shot the toughest boss. After that, playing normally felt pointless to them.

View on HN

I've done pretty much the same thing with idle games. They make me really obsessive. I edit a save file or inject some javascript in the console once I've decided to quit. Once I have infinite resources, I can see how shallow the endgame is and I lose any will to play.

"The person used an unofficial server with cheats to instantly get the best gear"

> Smart, unfortunately I didn't think of this. I feel like if I did, maybe I wouldn't have spent so much time on this game. My addiction to the game really took a toll an people around me who cares / loves me. I feel bad, but really there was nothing I could do except finish.

I'm wondering if there is a certain personality / mindset that is susceptible to gaming addiction.

I really appreciate you talking so openly about it. It really can be one hell of a drug. I don't really think the personality traits are quite different to people who go to casinos or lose all their money on the stock markets. It's this idea to get better, better, better at all costs. Just one more thing and I'll stop, however after this thing there's another thing waiting and so on and so on. It never ends (well, except as how you did it :) Hope you leave it all to rest now before the next addon comes. Actually, I think the developers are quite user oriented so if you would ask them to ban you, they probably would.)

You could press Shift IIRC, particularly if the skill you were using was bound to LMB. That way hold LMB down to move around and hit shift when you need to attack.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com