I played heavily back in the day I don’t think the money was ever really the problem It was the time. When I finally settled down and had a family I had to stop. $15 a month for service and $50 every 2 years for DLC isn’t really all that much money If you consider 60 hours a week of entertainment for that price a deal. If you are that close to the edge you’re going to be on the edge anyway.
I mean it’s actually fair and it’s not the game’s fault.
Hell I bet if we dug into a deeper it turns out to be age gap as much as anything else.
When I grew up, video game consoles were hard for the sake of being hard because the games didn’t have enough storage and ram to be that long. Back then I hated dragon’s lair because it was so f****** pretty and I really wanted to play it so bad, but it was just a coin eater and I was too young to have disposable income
I moved into first person shooters around the time of Quake. I was decently skilled but not amazing, but I was making enough money that I could afford a really nice rig and a really fast connection. Slowly FPS started turning into military combat which I really didn’t care for.
Many years later I got into mmorpgs, I spent thousands of hours playing in guilds, running raids, and grinding equipment. I still hated the same things but didn’t really focus much on them because the only thing I did was MMO.
Years later I start a family, now I hate anything that’s not casual. If I can’t pick it up play it for 30-40 minutes and put it away it’s going to do nothing for me that cost me pain.
Dark age of Camelot, had a guild made up of mostly locals. Did a custom website, scraped Mythics rankings, put in interactive maps, scroll trading system. It was all a hoot, moved to Warcraft after. Solid group of good people.