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How To Help a Friend With an MMO Addiction?
sammydee writes "I have a friend who is addicted to an MMO (Pirates of the Burning Sea). On a typical day, he will wake up around 9am, browse the forums for a bit, then go online and stay online all day, playing until about 3am the following morning, taking only toilet breaks and stopping to eat ready-meals. While the rest of the house works hard revising for exams, this friend will be playing his MMO instead. Now, I am pretty confident that this comprises an unhealthy addiction; unfortunately, I have no idea what to do about it. Any attempt to physically prevent him from playing the game would most likely result in an outburst of anger and possibly physical violence. Attempts at telling him he has a problem have been met with derision and angry retorts. Slashdotters, what would you do to help out a friend in this situation? Perhaps you are a reformed addict yourself — if so, how did you break out of the habit? Or maybe I should just leave well enough alone and allow him to continue? Any thoughts are gratefully received."
Get him a girlfriend.
That's pretty much the only solution.
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He's addicted to being a pirate. He's too far gone to be saved...all you can do is sandbag around his computer. But when the replica cannon arrives via UPS, I suggest you leave.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Toilet Breaks? Tell him he's doing it wrong.
The dude doesn't even have a pod.
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/99onicotrel.phtml
I^HMy friend is addicted to Slashdot.
He would have sex but he couldn't get a date and besides nobody wants to date an unemployed nerd.
getting some what? STDs?
Or you can sign up for Comcast and get that all with no effort!
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Hopefully you've got a router. Using the built-in firewall, block the ports that the game requires. on and off for five minutes at a time. So he has to keep logging in and never makes any progress (well, even less than normal...), but doesn't realize you're fiddling with it.
If you can't place a linux box as router without being suspicious, you might be able set up a cron job on cheapo laptop you connect to automatically keep changing the commodity router's settings.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Very easy...
You and 4 or 5 of your friends all get accounts, and then follow him around in the game ganking all his treasure.
-- Terry
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
I have this friend IRL right and he's so attached his education that his not living life. He sacrifices any bit of fun for it. He gets up around 9am, calls his mum in Denver, and then hits the books until about 3am only leaving his desk to put a piece of cheese on some bread and maybe take a shit. His desk is totally littered with empty energy drink bottles and sometimes he pisses in an empty instead of getting up to go to the bathroom. Once he accidentally drank a recycled one and just vomited in another.
There's this pirate game right, it's awesome! Swashbuckling and harrr! Open seas! Booty! Awesomez!!! and I've tried to bring it up with him every now and again but my suggestions are always met with derision and anger. "You're sleeping your future away with that crap!" he'll yell. He can't see that he's missing out on all this fun with his addiction to success.
I've tried using wake-on-LAN and changing his home page but it just won't work. What can I do to help him?
Just as heroin was developed to get soldiers off morphine, you need to get your friend on something stronger than pirates. The only thing stronger than pirates? Ninjas.
Ah, the I want you to hit me as hard as you can approach?
"Sure, but then they'll be hooked on griefing people. Really it is more addictive than the games themselves."
Easy solution to that: Just get them some heroin to take their minds off the griefing.
Then one day, he comes upstairs and says to his dad "I canceled my account. I'm going for a run."
A glorious story of triumph in the face of adversity. Everyone working against him, trying to make him quit, but he stuck with it and ultimately emerged victorious. Seeing "The End." come up on the screen must have been a moment for the ages.
Simple, get him addicted to slashdot instead
Table-ized A.I.
>>That's pretty much the only solution.
Is it? I was thinking that if you were an addict's roommate, you could play games with the router to suck all the fun out of an MMORPG. Hell, just a latency of 800ms and 25% packet loss makes any game feel like pulling teeth. Or if you don't want to make it obvious that you're messing with him, ~450ms and 25% packet loss. It'll become so frustrating it will no longer be fun. And for all the talk about addicts and addictive behavior, at the heart of it, people play MMORPGS because (they think) they're having fun.
And if you don't know how to mess with a router, or you don't have root access to it? Bittorrent. Seriously.
When I was playing a lot of WoW, whenever my roommate started downloading whatever it was he was downloading behind a locked door, I'd have to shut down the game. If it went on for more than a day or so, then I'd escalate to rebooting the router, unplugging his ethernet line, etc., which is why I'd recommend making sure the person conducting the "intervention" keep the router in a locked cabinet or room.
What we need to do is pay people to play games. Make a profession out of it, and promote the growth of ARGs.
Then one day, he comes upstairs and says to his dad "I canceled my account. I'm going for a run."
Relax. As soon as he finds his body, he'll be ready to play again.
If your girlfriend can't compete with a MMO, she's not trying. Whether she should be trying to make it work is another subject and varies based on situation. Usually, though, the MMORPG is a symptom, not the disease itself.
The Girlfriend doesn't compete WITH the MMO, the Girlfriend joins and tags along IN the MMO. Once inside the game, she will alienate him from his merry band of adventurers by complaining that he doesn't spend enough alone time with her in the game. Eventually he will throw himself into his schoolwork just to get away from her for a few hours.
Ugh, how could you list Religion as #1? That addiction has destroyed the lives of uncountably many more people than MMORPGs.
Religion provides real-life community which the person can use to find mates for procreation. MMORPGs do not.
By the way, I'm an atheist.
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