FoxFairline

5,500 hours in Team Fortress 2 and over 6k in Guild wars 2. I do not regret any of it. Had lots of fun and even met my wife in gw2.

You only lose time when you do things you do not enjoy.

Realizing you are not really enjoying something is a whole other discussion ofc.

I agree that most gamemodes do not play that way, and the classes are more restrictive to be a pure arena shooter.

But playing soldier or scout in gamemodes like Koth and PlayerDestruction scratch that itch enough for me to count.

Fast respawn and itemspawn management, combined with good map knowledge feels like good old quake 3 or UT sometimes.

Then you have dozens of rocketjumping maps in the server browser, which no game i know of has these days.

Team fortress 2 is still going good even if the only updates are from the community in terms of maps.

I

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Guild wars 2! Giant map to explore and alright story in the free to play part.

Even if you pick different backrounds and race you can port to the other starting maps and the story connects everything later on.

It also gets more difficult so dont think it is always easy like in the starter zones.

And it is one of the old school f2ps thats still good without paying if you wanna try it out.

But if you spend money on an expac you keep it and dont have to pay for a savegame like WoW.

One of the rare MMOs that values your time and money.

Very fitting meme if you remember the harrasement scandal at riot a few years back.

As an alternative that does not require booster packs or such nonsense i can highly recommend Compile and the Vale of eternity. Both very good cardgames that capture different feelings of playing a deckbuilder.

Never cared for CCGs since they are by definition pay to win.

If you want to scratch a similar itch, and have not already, try Guild Wars 2.

It does have microtransactions, but only because they have no subscription fee and they are mostly cosmetic with a few rare exceptions.

It also has no FOMO except cosmetics from certain festivals, which you can also buy in the next year.

It is still the best MMO on the market IMHO, because it values your time and money compared to other games in the genre.

Wish she was on mastodon instead.... Really enjoyed her tweets back in the days.

Guild wars 2 has so much variety i would not know where to start. Would just search it on youtube and find the fitting mood i guess.

That people still pay monthly for save games has always been wild for me.