What are you binge watching/playing for the apocalypse?

Ronin38 said:

Wow... I mean... WoW! I played back in 2009 or so, is that the "Classic" you're talking about? I didn't know there were "Generations" of WoW now.
I only had one character that reached L40, but I had 5 or 6 other characters I messed around with, ALL different types!
I'm not even sure my current desktop would even play WoW, and I don't really have time any more for long campaigns.

Anyone know a fun, fairly easy game, FPS or Hack n' Slash, where I could jump in, play for 10 to 20 minutes, and just have a lil' fun for a stress reliever? :dunno:

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I'm almost ashamed at my time on WoW. At one point in time, my life got so warped that work was actually my escape from WoW. LOL! When we started playing, I was in a 4-10's job, so I could start playing solid Thursday night. It was pretty ridiculous. Even worse, Lisa was playing, too, and she got serious about it.

The game is really . . . well engineered to trap people. They people who designed the game studied other MMO's and RP games to see what people liked and why they quit playing. Basically, it's like the Matrix . . . if you make everything wine and roses, people get bored. They have no sense of accomplishment, so they made the game ebb and flow. And they learned to throw in things along the way that sidetracked you with rewards that didn't necessarily make you more powerful, but it was "cool". And probably the biggest twist of the game is that once you got to the "top level", it wasn't over. It just gets started. All of the truly difficult and rewarding content opens up then, so you're sort of "renewed" if you will. Think of it like a video game / sim where you start out as a 6 year old kid in pee wee football, and you THINK then end of the game is when an NFL team signs you . . . only you find out that when you sign the contract, that's actually the BEGINNING of the game, and everything you learned to that point was just preparation. That's what the engineers at WoW did. When you hit level 60 (back in the day . . . it's 120 now), tons of new and progressive content opened up. It was really well thought out and designed to maintain interest and clients . . . for $15/month.

It's evolved a lot over time, and they've taken out a lot of the difficulty. And new players who start a subscription get a "free" character that's already leveled up to almost terminal. I get it because starting at level 1 with no other toon would be demotivating. Still though, the game now is stupid easy, and if you have a friend or two to play with, there's not much challenge at all. And since you start out with a "big" toon now for new players, you have money to gear up anyone you level.

The game has lost a lot of that sense of accomplishment, really. The "generations" are based on what expansion was out at the time. "Vanilla" is the first game, and that's what "Classic" uses, now. I think they've had 5 expansions and are about to drop another one. Vanilla was tough. There were raids that required 40 people play as one team, and they HAD to play as one team. Even worse, that was back when the intrawebz wasn't nearly as fast. LOL! You fought data transfer speed as much as anything. There was a lot to it because once you got "big", you ceased to be able to progress alone. You HAD to have friends in the game because all the advanced content requires 5, 10, and 20 person teams . . . and a couple of the early ones needed 40. In Vanilla, you couldn't just "sign up" to run those events. You had to have a premade group, so you had to earn friends and show people you were good enough to make it. And people had to be willing to "train" you on the events. It was really a small microcosm of real life i.e. you can get just so far alone. Eventually, you need other people, and sometimes those people came in ready, and sometimes you had to be willing to invest time in training them.

The later versions of WoW have "random" group finders, so you can just put your name in a hat and play events. There's no "social" needed, and anyone can do it. It makes the game a faster but lower reward thing.

If you're looking for an easy hack and slash, eh, the current version of WoW is pretty easy and mindless.