The longer the invested time before it ticks over the higher the timeframe commonly.
So it depends.
It also depends on mental condition, how much other stuff is going on the life of the person, how many alternative options for entertainment they have and so on.
It’s surprisingly variable there. Some realize the issue the second it appears… others play on for thousands of hours always feeling disappointed. It’s not that the experience is awful… it’s that it’s just at the brink of unfulfilling enough to finally detach yourself fully.
Lack of options from lack of experience.
Faulty strategies for dealing with arising issues (as those strategies have worked on other circumstances and ingrained)
And as you say… it could also be a sign of emotional issues.
But it’s by far not as clear cut as you think. The likelyhood for your option is only on the second place, faulty strategies which have become habits are the primary reason. Lack of experience is unlikely unless someone is rather young or quite low IQ (longer learning durations needed in magnitudes).
This is the bit I have difficulty getting my head around. Thousands of hours after they’re in the net negative feelings about a game (not including the amount of time they’re playing for while they’re enjoying it).
Yup, emotions are complicated shit.
Don’t worry, you can rest easy in all your whale-y majesty that I feel suitably abashed and ashamed at having been “called out” for being “closed minded” by a whale person on the internet. But I will continue to try harder to pay attention to what people are writing rather than what I think people are writing.
It’s the classic gambler’s fallacy… or sunken cost fallacy which happens.
The issue why that is so hard for some people to break out of is that while it accurs you’re after all putting more energy inside… which makes the fallacy even stronger as more would be ‘lost’ by stopping.
Is it? At one point I got the impression the stand alone client will not be continued . Then again I didn’t care that much because I#m so smard I have almost all my games in one basket and nothing will go wrong about this ever .
Yeah, there’s still a standalone client, it’s how you play in true offline. So even if the servers went down for good, you could still keep playing LE.
And yes, if Valve ever decides to go evil lots of people are screwed. But considering the options, at least Valve is stable. If you had your games spread out on other providers, you’d risk losing a few games every now and then as they go under.
So given the option between the unlikely (at least so far) chance that Valve will go tits up or that some other distribution system will (much more likely), I’d rather take the low chance of losing all at once than the higher chance of losing a few regularly.
There appears to be a misunderstanding. Macknum was most likely referring to the stand-alone client that wasn’t attached to Steam and its systems in any way. EHG discontinued that client at some point, as described here, moved everything to Steam and consolidated all game modes (offline and online) into one game/client.
You’re probably talking about the offline “client”/portion of the game, that isn’t really stand-alone in the sense of being independent from Steam (and separate from the online part).
I see. Yeah, you don’t have that anymore. But is the offline client through steam functionally different? You can still play LE if EHG decides to shut down and abandon the game.
If push comes to shove, since the files are still in your drive, if steam goes tits up, you can still find ways to play it.
. Then again I didn’t care that much because I#m so smard I have almost all my games in one basket and nothing will go wrong about this ever 
.