Stopped playing computer games. I played Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone a lot. Like almost every evening when I had nothing else to do. I noticed over time two things:
First, I can't play such games in a non-competitive way. While some seem to play Hearthstone for fun, I play to win and I want to figure out how to do so.
This leads me to second: Ultimately, for an hour's worth of gaming time, I had a few feel-good moments and the rest was emotionally stressful. I hated the luck of Hearthstone, I hated random assholes in Heroes of the Storm who'd destroy the game.
When I realized that my emotions were determined by a random number generator I had no control over (matches and card draws), I finally decided to quit playing games for 30 days. After this month, I didn't really miss anything, used the free time to do other things and removed the Windows Bootcamp partition of my Mac with all games and never looked back.
A few weeks back, I played Hotline Miami 2. A single player game. It was okay, didn't waste endless hours of my time and had a definite end – not like multiplayer games where there is no end. But single player games won't cut it for me anyways and haven't for a long time already. I think they're mostly boring.
Just a heads-up, but if you ever take interest in card games again, I'd recommend giving Magic: The Gathering a try.
Why?
• There are no cards with the words "random" on them
• Of the cards you draw, you can mulligan several times to get a better hand
• Many cards let you search your deck and pull out what you need, or something similar, further reducing "chance" being a factor
• You play a game of Best-of-3, and on your following turns you can choose any cards from a "sideboard" to slot into your deck to adapt to the current match, again, reducing chance, and reducing Rock/Paper/Scissors fights
• You don't simply play your cards, push "Done", then go grab a drink. You can play cards DURING the other player's turn to manipulate and overcome their strategy. (This is the REAL reason I can't play Hearthstone. It lacks an entire other dimension of play.)
• Magic has more resources to draw from (cards, life, graveyard, mana, tokens, creatures, artifacts, equipment, etc), and more resources to consider, making the strategies much more varied
• The complexity of Magic cards is on the order of about 3-5x more than Hearthstone. The cards used in Hearthstone compare only to beginner decks designed for kids to learn MTG, whereas MTG cards can be incredibly complex in the strategies they afford you: http://magiccards.info/scans/en/m13/220.jpg
The list goes on, but coming from MTG, Hearthstone felt like playing a very limited, aggro-focused, RNG-dependent game designed for quick matches with simple strategy and little thinking, versus Magic, which you can play on paper with your buddies, at a table, and have fun drinking and joking around. (At least that's how I play it.)
Eeeh. Don't start with MTG. Its a big time and money consumer. It's super fun! But soon your apartment is going to be flooded with half made decks, binders you ment to sort and every few months you just have to buy the new set. It's a brilliant game, and I still play it from time to time. But it can get a bit to involving. Case in point; I recently bought 50packs of a 100 KFC perfect inner sleeves so that I could start double sleeving all my cards..
Yea, I know what you mean. When I first played I got into it and burned out fast. Now I just play pre-made Duel Decks with my buddies, or we go out and do a draft at a store. Just $10 and half the time I break even from selling the cards I drafted/won right after we finish.
I mostly posted my comment because I saw he had the same complaints about the RNG in Hearthstone, which personally drives me crazy. I figured he'd enjoy MTG more because it doesn't have such flaws.
Hey thanks for mentioning it and your detailed introduction. I actually played MtG before Hearthstone for a while. Never played competitively, but I think I should take a second look at MtG now since I grew tired of Hearthstone :)
First, I can't play such games in a non-competitive way. While some seem to play Hearthstone for fun, I play to win and I want to figure out how to do so.
This leads me to second: Ultimately, for an hour's worth of gaming time, I had a few feel-good moments and the rest was emotionally stressful. I hated the luck of Hearthstone, I hated random assholes in Heroes of the Storm who'd destroy the game.
When I realized that my emotions were determined by a random number generator I had no control over (matches and card draws), I finally decided to quit playing games for 30 days. After this month, I didn't really miss anything, used the free time to do other things and removed the Windows Bootcamp partition of my Mac with all games and never looked back.
A few weeks back, I played Hotline Miami 2. A single player game. It was okay, didn't waste endless hours of my time and had a definite end – not like multiplayer games where there is no end. But single player games won't cut it for me anyways and haven't for a long time already. I think they're mostly boring.