If you read my own recent post, you can see I’m one of those players that tried SWTOR and left- in my defence, I tried it at the urging of some friends and was willing to over look a fair amount, it was more the net experience and disappointment the Legacy feature Bioware touted. And I’ve gone back to a game I do enjoy which has many of the structural issues of WOW or SWTOR, but I simply enjoy playing it.

In the end, players invest a lot of time in a MMO and money (if there’s a subscription) for the purpose of entertainment. If it doesn’t entertain, it is time to move on. I do think the MMO community is pretty jaded by the current state of the art and is looking for more than endgame-grind and kil-this/fetch-that quests. For that reason, I have hopes for Guild War 2 but if GW2 doesn’t work, I enjoy Rift and will continue that.

First thing I did was to play the game without a set goal in mind. I already had a level 50 character, knew what most of the game was about and I was mostly looking to spend some time and just relax.

In fact when I think about it I think that was the key. I started playing the game simply to relax without any real goal in mind, kinda like what I was doing with Lotro. I would run after whatever grabbed my attention at the moment whether it was pvp, quests or just exploration. Playing a game without a voice running through your head telling you your wasting time because you need to do X or Y is in itself a huge improvement.

The second big thing is to not mind the flaws. I know I hate the whole space station aspect in a lot of the planets. It’s annoying but I’ve been telling myself that in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter so much and soon enough I stopped paying attention.

I mean, I’m like you, been gaming since I was 5 and I make comparisons all the time. I don’t remember where the idea came from but I know I’ve been working on silencing that critic voice. If I listen to it all the the time I won’t enjoy any game ever again and I love game way too much to let myself be brought down.

Don’t know if that answered the question but good comment. I’ll try to think more on it to come with something more coherent.

Still, I’m having a hard time doing so. It’s hard to ignore a vast library of game experience each time you play a game. I try to go into new games and judge them only on their own merits, but honestly, I’m terrible at it. I might survive a play session or ten, but eventually my experience catches up with me, or, more accurately, I finally become unable to continue to silence my game experience, and comparisons start being made. I’m not sure what to do to stop that. How did you recapture it during your second play through?