At the risk of sounding like a turd, and I guess by that I mean "I'm gonna sound like a turd when I say this," but do you guys actually care that much about your rank on Iso, or on any gaming website?
I guess it kind of evolves. I mean, everybody starts out the same way with Dominion.
Everyone remembers the first time they played two action cards in a row or Chapeled their entire deck.
This is what spurred most of us to keep playing. Hey, what a great game, infinite number of possibilities.
But gradually you become better at spotting combos and putting engines together, so your rating inevitably goes up. Now if you're in the mid-20's, that's a good place to be. There are as much players above you as there are beneath you. That means that you'll win some, and you'll lose some.
But as you grind your way up to the 40's, you start to get more aware of your rating. You start thinking "hey, I'm pretty good at this, let's see how high I can get" and you might start taking less risks and having less fun. You stop challenging yourself, you start just trying to beat your opponent every which way you can and often it involves resorting to default moves. Because you're sticking to what you know - god forbid you'll try something new that happens to be pretty stupid and lose - you stop learning. So you end up hovering at whatever rating you ended up at, because you're still using the same strategy that got you there, you've stopped evolving as a player. At this point your rating has become an end instead of the means that it used to be: to find equally skilled players. I don't know about any of the players who are in the top tier, like Rabid, Marin and -Stef-, but I guess once you get skilled at something, you just want to see how far you can go. The competitiveness is fueled by the results.
Now I'm not saying that I got so focused on my rating that I never dared to try anything new, but it was part of the reason why I quit. It's just a pitfall that you have to watch out for. I think there are a lot of players who might fall for the same trap, so that's also why I posted this.
Another reason is that I've just played so many games, ~5000 between accounts and this means that you see some exciting new combo less often. It really does become a grind: Recognize the power card, get the power card asap, destroy opponent. You can get pretty good results with this as Dominion is such a runaway game. An early Gold or $5 can swing the odds heavily in your favor as early as turn 1.
And you might think: "Well, maybe you just have no self control, this will never happen to me, I'm a healthy mature human being with good reasoning." Okay, well, good for you, but I'm no crack addict who needed his fix everyday. There has been many a weekend when I didn't play and didn't even think twice about it.
So, this break is more harmless than a self-intervention. I just find it easier to not play than to play occasionally.
I'm just "worn out" by having played too many online games. There's no point to keep on playing if you sigh everytime you hit $2P on turn 5 in a Familiar game or if you think to yourself: "Here we go again with this slogfest" when Ambassador is on the board. I mean, what are you doing? You are wasting a good 30 minutes of both players' time. I guess I feel I've seen it all for now.
I'm satisfied by my accomplishments, I don't need to keep on proving anything to anyone.
I'll never be worn out by Dominion as I said and you can basically wake me up anytime to play it in real life, because I love the interaction of board games in general and Dominion will always have a special place in my heart. I mean, I won the Dutch Championships! And I will most likely try to defend my title in 2013.
It's also about the kind of person I am: I can get really excited about something, go overboard with it and when I'm done, just walk away and move on. Part of the reason is because I love being part of a community, I've done this with Diablo II for instance and with the Lord of the Rings: Online. That's why I'll probably remain an active member on these forums, until I've found the next best thing and indulge myself with that.
Your kind comments are much appreciated by me and I hope this will serve as a reminder for everyone else out there:
JUST HAVE FUN, IT'S A GAME!Once you're done with it, you can stop playing if you want, you don't have to keep at it just to achieve a meaningless rating that will be erased in a couple of weeks/months anyway.