Easy! Just fall asleep while trying to squeeze in some gaming before bed. Pretty sure time on the title screen or a ‘kicked due to inactivity’ notification will count towards those hours.
At least half of my Elite Dangerous hours were slept through.
Summary: 3k hours into World of Warcraft, Retail + WotLK private server.
I’ve been playing vidya since… 1992? Classic Monochrome-green machine to play CalGames on.
Ever since then, my limit for a game tended to be about 100 hours. I got 500 hours into Clicker Heroes, sure, but that game was made to be run in the background, so that doesn’t really count.
It was not until I found World of Warcraft where I slowly pumped hour after hour into its massive world. I found it somewhere in 2021 - near the end of BFA. The Shadowlands beta was out, is when I started. OK sure, I played a few hours at a classmate’s house back in 2005, but I don’t feel that counts. Anyway, I found that there was a F2P version where I could freely try out most classes, quite a few races, and a ton of quests.
I’ve walked everywhere (I even tracked where I’ve been in a massive image of the worldmap for about 500 hours-ish?), I walked because the mounts weren’t available for F2P yet, did all the quests I could, tried every race (which includes the starter zones), every class available (had an excel where I planned it all out).
I ended up with 1000 hours. 500 for my main (Human Paladin - been wanting to play that since Warcraft 2), and another 500 spread out over my 40 or so alts. Ever since I’ve been coming back, because with each expansion release, a little bit more content becomes available, so I racked up another 500 hours there.
In the meantime, WotLK Classic was going to release, but my income was still shit, so I found Warmane, a non-Blizzard server. You could level 7x as fast, which I did a few times, simply to learn the difference between “Classic” and “Retail”.
Then it hit me. I want the Loremaster title. That meant doing a little over 3000 quests (about 99.99% of all quests in the game). But 7x made me level too fast. Luckily for me, there was a 0.5x XP option. So that’s how I grinded. I did every starter zone, every regular zone, every dungeon (I was typically the “overgeared” guy of the group, since the rest was rushing through). I had fun!
That grind took me 1000 hours total. Plus another 500 for all the alts before that.
I’m pretty sure I played over 3000 hours total.
Oh, and I ended up getting my Loremaster title, as well as the World Explorer Tabbard (because I’ve been everywhere).
My favourite places to run around was 100% the old world. Black Rock Depths just has an atmosphere that’s completely missing from TBC onwards :(
I’ve been thinking of playing TurtleWoW, but not sure if I can survive the Vanilla client - the WotLK one was already pretty rough 😂
A typical working year is approximately 2,000 hours, just for context.
That is nuts.
Woo, means I can officially add Warframe to my work experience (2.7k)!
one of my steam friends has a program that farms steam hours, just for the shock factor
this is considered strange behavior in my house
Sooo Furry Hitler 2 is not as good as Furry Hitler 1?
The sex scenes have fewer fetishes
Steam just tracks how long the program is running. My old rig played Dark Souls 3 24/7 sometimes because the .exe file would glitch and stay open until I manually terminated it. I averaged 168 hours a week coming back from a 2 week vacation once.
Yeah, my friend has this same issue. She has been playing The Sims 4 for like seven months now.
i have 1200h in skyrim, 1000 of which i clocked in because as pre-teen who was yet to learn that being trans is a thing i unknowingly used it to escape dysphoria. can’t feel bad if i’m spending most of my days as male cat, the chosen one at that!
I wouldn’t be surprised if basically every person with over 1k hours in a game isn’t seeking some sort of escapism, not counting the anomalies like people leaving servers running etc.
I suppose every minute in a game is escapism of some sort, but escapism from dysphoria or something else significant, I think would be common.
I don’t think you need 1k hours to indicate games are being used as an escape. It could be a social thing where a group plays regularly and has invested time in the group and world such as Starcraft or WoW. I don’t disagree at all that games can be an escape for people with life issues, I just don’t know if hours invested is a great indicator. I’ve got over 3k in one game, but that’s mostly because it’s got quick rounds, I can start and stop between other things with no penalty, it’s been out for 4 years, and I still find it fun. The time adds up.
Leaving a game running in the backvround while doing other things still adds up
I have several hundred hours in PAYDAY 2 because I didn’t have heat one winter and the main menu kept my room warm lol
I have over 1,900 hrs on Deep Rock Galactic.
The key is persistence.
Rock and Stone! oT
3500 here. Actually, the key is procrastination.
I honestly don’t get it. I’ve been playing the same game for about three months of real time now and clocked in about 120 hours. I didn’t play anything else and and it’s consuming most of the time I have to myself. The game is Witcher 3.
Now, that means every 1000 hours would take me 25 months or just over two years of playing a game exclusively. Probably more since my data above includes my Christmas vacation, which was quite lengthy. No single game is good enough to take such a big place in my life. I could play so many shorter better games.
I’m playing Team Fortress 2 since 2010 and have around 2500 hours. So it’s not hard to reach high numbers if the game is old enough, which some are.
I’ve got a couple games with stats like that; and I do play them a lot… but I think a big slice of the time is that I often leave the game open basically all day while dipping in and out to do other things.
The play time is ticking up, but I’m having lunch, or doing laundry, or clearing the house or whatever; and I come back to the game when I’m done.
Me and satisfactory
My top two are Kerbal Space Program, at 2007 hours, and Satisfactory at 1,787 hours. And yeah, Satisfactory has its time exaggerated, as often you just got to let the factory run.
My play time on Kerbal Space Program 2?
17 minutes.
Forget getting to the moon my team crashed against dat learning curve
My preferred mode of play is what I call “Iron Kerbal.” Career mode. No reloads. No respawning. No reverting flights. I can manage everything except an Eve landing and return without reloads. Or, late game, I can manage an Eve landing and recovery if I have enough resources to just keep throwing crews at the planet.
