Yeah looking back I wish I had not spent so much time in video games doing nothing. The endless grinding of Diablo 2 is a perfect example.
I'm also sad I joined an MMO. thats been a worthless use of my time and I only just recently figured it out.
And I'm not judging, all of us on here probably played this and have done this. I don't expect my opinion or value to apply to anyone else. So I don't mean any negative or disrespect mentioning it how I did above towards anyone.
If you enjoy what you do with your time, that's all that matters.
For me, I just found that it's too easy to use grinding and repetitive endless games like this as merely an outlet to
not have to do anything else, or it's a great way to lose time and get old fast and find out you may have wanted to do other things with your time when you were younger; something the older-version-of-yourself tends to look back on. I straight up didn't go out with friends or get with my family on many occasions because I was gaming through the weekend. I had fun at the time, but now I look back and I shake my head at myself. Plus those games are dead and gone and no saves and my accounts deleted off old battle.net.
Then you have the loot system like Diablo 3 come around, and every monster you kill drops good stuff. You get full legendary sets right away. Your ladder quests give you full top shelf legendary sets. You climb to end-game content immediately in that game. Then the game isn't about grinding for items, it's just grinding for perfect versions of the items or leveling up legendary gems and seeing how far you can g-rift, etc. Still a ton of grinding. And you'd think people would love it, but it took something away compared to the grind in D2 (where usually you got NOTHING for your time) and so its easy to just get bored with Diablo 3 because they give you everything and your characters are end-game on their own fast, without having to g-rush and do endless Sanc/Baal runs on hardest difficulty, etc. So it becomes kind of pointless after a while, and you don't even need friends in that game at all to accomplish anything, unlike D2.
Anyhow, these days I don't get into any online grind game. I like to play games like the next person. I just prefer to play a game with a story and PvE basically and enjoy the game play and the story unveiled and when its over its over; next game. I still end up wasting time on games. But we all waste time in a way on something, and that's fine. I just personally found grinding to be a very big waste of my own time. For me, I'd rather play 10 new games than play 1 grinding game for the same time. I realized I didn't get anything from the grinding but I do get something from playing new games, new experiences, not just repetitive endless going-through-the-motions.
I'll probably play through D4 when, if ever, it releases. Because I am an old fan. But I won't sink hours into online play with it like D2 and D3. I'll treat it more like D1 and just play through it and at the end I played the game and I can move on.
Very best,
