My gaming history:

The first game I ever played seriously was Unreal Tournament at an early age. After that most games were just mindless fun until I got a hold of Counter-Strike 1.6. I became hooked on these two games right through my childhood. The next most interesting games I enjoyed would be GTA 3/Vice City and later in high school, San Andreas. These ate up a considerable amount of my time back then. Later I would be introduced to Diablo 2 in 2007. As I had played Dungeon Siege before it, I was instantly obsessed with it. But not long afterwards, I was given Warcraft 3 with a ton of user-made maps from my brother. One of which was DotA, which my brother encouraged me to play online. Let's just say it all went downhill from there, and that would be my first time playing any game online.

I spent tons of hours every day playing DotA. I enjoyed it a lot and got somewhat good at it. But as most people who play MOBA's know, you can win and still feel like you lost. This would happen too often for my liking and so despite enjoying the game, I stopped playing it for good. However, this led to me trying other online games, the next being Freelancer. Which did not have any official servers up at the time. Instead, I joined Discovery Freelancer, a modded version of the game. I spent a good few years in that community, made a few friends, had a good time most of the time and was often in TeamSpeak with these guys all day long. As time passed, they began to leave or get banned by the ever declining community, due to power corrupting the admin team. They were idiots and you never give an idiot any power. I too ended up being silently banned and removed without any chance at resolution due to admin bias, naturally. I am 100% sure they put a stranglehold on the game and destroyed any chance it had to continue in a healthy state.

This led me down my next path in gaming, where I have mostly given up on competitive stuff, yet I do enjoy playing HotS every now and then. A shame Blizzard abandoned it (Yes, they did Dan). I enjoy jumping between MMO's such as Warframe, BDO, FFXIV, PoE, WoW, a bit of SWTOR and lately Lost Ark. All of which I spend 0 time interacting with other players because the majority of people online are so heavily steeped in internet culture that I can't stomach pretending to think it's even slightly funny anymore. But maybe I am just bitter nowadays. Or maybe it's just that I have grown older. Who knows and no one cares. I do still try to play at a higher than average level in any game I play. Only because I can't be bothered to be a hardcore player and I don't play most games casually either.

I can't say that gaming is fading out of my life just yet, but with my previous statements, it does make me wonder, is that the beginning of the end? Might be... Might just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ be. I am still very much an MMO, ARPG and soulslike fan and will always give games in these genres a go - if they don't cost ridiculous amounts of money.

P.S. - I just wanted to write some ♥♥♥♥ on my profile, like that story about Luke.