It's been year since i played it last. But in the little corp I was a part of the leadership had phone numbers and/or IM on each other to get people online quickly in emergencies. The commitment was unreal.
What surprised me was the sense of community around it. I met people from all over the world who play. We had discords, ran guilds, had actual leadership responsibilities, would call people in the middle of the night when they were being rallied, etc. Before I decided I was done, I was running bot accounts (to act as guild banks and whatnot), and it felt like a part time job. It was very involved for a mobile game. If I’m honest it was probably the sense of community I felt, which I hadn’t felt online in many years, that made me stick around. Still I don’t recommend anyone actually play it.
Sounds like a fun experience to me, like most things like this: it's not a problem until it a problem (aka it affects your life negatively). At least compared to most people vegging out on their couch binge watching Netflix.
> I met people from all over the world who play. We had discords, ran guilds, had actual leadership responsibilities, would call people in the middle of the night when they were being rallied, etc.
Being a serious gamer is often much more than just the game, but the community/social experience and (potentially) personal development in highly a competitive environment. Eve is similarly known for being much more than a game but running pseudo-corporations. Of course the addiction/time/money stuff is where you start risking hitting the live wire.
I hate every time I think about it, I could have been learning to code, advancing my career and doing interesting things that I think back fondly about. Instead there's just a void in my life where I did nothing, learned nothing, and copied other people's builds in a game and hit buttons really fast and stayed out of the red areas during raids while hitting buttons fast. It makes me feel gross.
And was it a social thing? Did you make friends, enjoy talking to people etc?
Did you miss out on your ususal chance to kick a puppy on your way to work today or something?
What you have shown yourself is you can stick with something. Why not try something else now, that you can do for the rest of your life? Carpentry? Guitar playing? Not obsessively, but just regularly. You have time.
It's tough to compare what I got with my time to what I missed out on, though, since I can't live those other lives. :)
Doesn't need to be "pay to win". It might be free, but reward the time commitment or regularity. But it has to matter to the player in some way.
Back in high school, we felt the similar draw and had some similar stories wrt. OGame - a space-themed browser MMO (kind of like dumbed down Stellaris, but with no animation and everything taking hours of real time to happen). There were "alliances", formal and informal. There was exploiting game mechanics to gain the upper hand. Scheduling attacks so that the fleet arrives in the middle of victim's night, hoping they aren't crazy enough to be logged in then (not like us). We paid with nothing, except our own time and attention.