In a recent post by Tobold about the cost of playing an MMO in terms of subscription vs. hours played, he casually threw out a number – 1000 hours – as the average per year for an average player. Curious, I popped on to Guild Wars and ran a /age to see how I stacked up, and the subject of this post was my result.
958 hours, over the course of 58 months. That’s… less than a minute and a half per day.
I will admit to being a bit shocked by the lack of time I appear to have racked up in not only my favorite game, but my longest-running continual hobby game, and one of the only ones to which I have devoted any out-of-game time to exploring lore, game mechanics, and development news – not to mention blogging about it. While it’s true that I have taken the occasional multi-month break from Guild Wars for various reasons (the trauma of Post-Searing, completion of campaigns, burnout, etc.), it is also true that I’ve played just about as much as I wanted to at any given time. And it isn’t that other games take my attention away for long; generally I would stop playing Guild Wars, and then look for a replacement to tide me over for a month or two.
In other words, this is literally as much MMO fun as I can handle. In fact, even the past two weeks I’ve been too busy to play and haven’t even logged on this week outside of checking my /age and brief scans of Lion’s Arch Party Search for groups running BLA (though it seems the crowd has moved on past that these days).
No wonder I don’t like subscriptions! I’d be paying $15 for the privilege of playing for an average of half an hour each month.
Casual Is As Casual Does 
tobolds figure is just a bit off in my opinion. I don’t think the “average” person plays 1000 hours a year at all, thats like almost 3 hours every single day. I think his experience is tainting his idea of the average person.
Fair enough, perhaps the average is a bit off. But I expected to find I spent maybe an average of 10 minutes per day or something in-game (when spread out over binges and periods of non-play, of course).
I remember spending 7 hours in one session with my guildies as they helped me finish Prophecies from Ice Caves of Sorrow, and I thought at the time that that was crazy excessive :P.
T_T
I’ve played over 2.5k hours over the past 18 months. *shame*
… I guess I’m firmly in the obssessive nugget camp.
Well, don’t expect me to throw stones from this glass house – I racked up another 9 hours this double-faction weekend :).
I can play maybe two hours a day…but 6-8 on the weekend if the game is keeping me occupied.
So, I CAN see how those figures would work for a regula MMO player…but for others it doesn’t.
Companies need to find a way to cater to both casual loggers and mass players like myself (event though I think I am not a “major” player)
I’ve seen the “20 hours/week” figure bandied about as an average for WoW players. I’m not sure where that datapoint (if it is indeed data, not just guesswork) comes from, but that would neatly translate to 1000 hours/year, give or take the odd day off.
Oh, and that’s a TON more time than I spend on ’em, even my favorites. No wonder I don’t like subs either. 😉
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